“The Psychologist” – Page 2 – psychology UNREDACTED

David Pilgrim posts…..

Editing a book on the crisis in the BPS was in one sense easy. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The Society is so dysfunctional and corrupt that the facts just spoke for themselves. I did hit some problems though. I had to lose some important contributions for reasons of sub judice. This was not because the claims to be made were untrue and without an extensive evidential basis. It was because the victim of a gross injustice, President-Elect Nigel MacLennan, was pursuing his legal right to redress, which I could not jeopardize by going public too soon with every damning fact known to me and other writers in the book.

In continuing their own desperate defence of past actions, the BPS leaders will take even more money from a currently uninformed membership. The latter deserve a detailed list of the costs involved in the campaign to persecute MacLennan. We are probably talking not tens of thousands of pounds, as was the case in relation to the fraud perpetrated by the PA of the CEO (see below) but hundreds of thousands, with the bill still mounting. Whose interests exactly have been served in this expensive campaign of disparagement of an individual, who was acting in good faith to improve governance in the BPS? When the dust settles on his case the costs to members entailed should be made known, given that to date the leaders have been coy about their accounting practices.

In my view, looking at the arc of this story and the evidence we have, it was because MacLennan was an incipient whistleblower that the cabal went out to get him, a process that had started early on in his tenure. The SMT and the Board of Trustees spotted a troublemaker in their midst, who might spill the beans on what was wrong in the Society and whose moral and legal culpability might be exposed. He was probably seen initially as an agitator for governance reform (his candidate statement for President forewarned them). When he moved from agitator to whistleblower (with Charity Commission interest becoming more evident) then his days looked numbered and his expulsion could soon be contrived. Whistleblowers blow the cover on dubious practice and there was much of this waiting to come out.

The problem of opaqueness and the cant in the BPS about its claimed ‘transparency’ have recurred in our critique of the BPS culture. Although the facts do indeed speak for themselves, secrecy and spin, ensured by the censorship role of the Comms Team and the silence of The Psychologist, meant that they were by no means all that easy to either come by or broadcast (Harvey, 2023).

When writing my history of the BPS across chapters in the book, I cautioned that the full details behind our criticisms were still patchy and shrouded from view. We may have got it wrong in whole or part: who knows for certain? The long standing organizational malaise in the BPS could all have been a set of innocent human errors, made by people of good will. On the other hand, the Machiavellianism could be much worse than even we have described. Indeed it is because leaders in the BPS have covered their tracks with such assiduous effort that we may never know, for certain, what has really happened in the Kafkaesque Leicester HQ.

We await a rebuttal of the arguments in our book from BPS officialdom but no effort has been made to date to offer a celebratory history of the Society, maybe for very good reason. Where would that celebration start exactly? How about the twice President and dodgy eugenicist Cyril Burt during the Second World War? How about the failure to set up an independent Board of Trustees in 1966 and missing a second bite of the cherry in 1988? How about the crash down of British empiricism and positivism in the wake of the postmodern turn in the discipline during the 1980s and 90s? How about the departing CEOs and other senior officials in the wake of financial crises, after the turn of this century? How about the New Public Management model and its consequences for a bloated economy in the Society? How exactly would this sow’s ear picture be turned into a proud silk purse for posterity? Spin in the present understandably does not welcome historical candour.

The spin is what has been said but the main strategy to keep members in the dark has been silence, ‘Keeping schtum’ has served self-interest at the top well. Call it what you wish (‘cover up’ ‘mystification’ ‘spin’, ‘bullshit’) the outcome is the same: the BPS is not and has never been transparent. Its ordinary members and the general public have been shielded from anything other than good news stories.

The surviving and still extensive contributions in the book were certainly damning enough. They demonstrated that the BPS has never had a fit-for-purpose Board of Trustees since it was recognized as a charity in British law. That lack of independent oversight has ensured organizational dysfunction, a lack of membership democracy, a lack of transparency, recurrent policy capture, the abandonment of freedom of expression and academic probity at the altar of modish identity politics, as well as of course financial mismanagement and then the corruption, with a prison sentence eventually attached. Thus, the lack of proper governance has triggered more than financial concerns alone.

I expand this point now more by looking at junkies, fraud and Pollyanna spin doctors as symptomatic aspects of the BPS organizational malaise. Together they have constituted a ‘kakistocracy’. The ugly but apposite term comes from the old Greek ‘kakistos’ meaning ‘worst’ and ‘kratos’ meaning ‘rule’.

BPS junkies

When then President Ray Miller quipped that he was a ‘BPS junkie’ we will never know why; the claim was fair comment but his motive for making it could reflect guilt, pride, either or both. The context was important though. He was in conversation with an early representative of the New Public Management approach, the CEO Tim Cornford, flexing its muscles at the turn of this century (Miller and Cornford, 2006). These two leaders of the organization ‘in conversation’ reflected a tentative hand over of power between the old regime of oligarchs and the new managers. Many of them, as was to become apparent, were not psychologists but some were. Together they shifted the organizational emphasis from academic values to those of a managed bureaucracy; a wider feature in the UK in the 1990s. (Third sector organizations, like those in the public sector, became both more marketized and more bureaucratized.)

With a shift from the traditional power of oligarchs with their recycled names to the controlling role of new management class with their invented new Orwellian titles, a struggle for who was top dog ensued. The controversial ‘Change Programme’ and the spiraling costs at the centre of the organization were symptoms of an insidious shift to unaccountable managerial power and financial profligacy. Fifteen years after Miller’s confession, President David Murphy made much of this popping financial bubble in his resignation letter, placed for all to see on social media. Seemingly, in his eyes, not only the crooked PA had been on a self-indulgent spending spree (see below).

Miller may have confessed his guilty secret but he was by no means the only recycled name at the top. Some, such as Ann Colley, upstaged him by being both the BPS President and CEO. Some took on the sinecure of ‘Honorary General Secretary’. Grand in its title, what it was, when the payment for it stopped, and for what reason, are like many things in the BPS lost in the haze of time. Hypnotized by personal cunning plans or seduced by old fashioned vanity, so much still remains unknown about these recycled names. Maybe they did it just because they could and it would always look good on their CV. ‘Junkies’ may be a metaphor for personal addiction to bureaucratic status and power in this context. However, the governance vacuum created by a lack of an independent Board of Trustees opened the door very widely to such personal craving and it then rewarded addicts. The latter could readily rationalize their overly-long involvement as service, but who were they serving?

One lesson we have learned in our campaigning is that some senior colleagues with long term involvement in the Society we have spoken to manifest degrees of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. They counter our criticisms by arguing that if only this person rather than that took over as the Chair of this or that sub-system, or could join the faux Board of Trustees, then the BPS dysfunction would soon be rectified. Another aspect of this quick ‘fixit’ mentality is the idea that a quiet private word with individuals at the top will ensure that a particular grievance or inefficiency will soon be resolved. We should stop our negativism and look on the bright side, curry favour with those in power now or prospectively, and it will all be OK. This theme of a new world coming in a BPS with bushy tailed innovators recurs over and over again (see below).

One ex-President we contacted was shocked by our sleuthing saying that she thought that she had, like Hercules, successfully ‘cleaned out the stables’ during her tenure. She accepted what we said but really believed that she had fixed the problem. Such defences of the old regime by senior colleague are, to put it politely, highly irrational. How precisely would individuals in their efficiency and integrity singlehandedly solve a structural problem? This naïve assumption could be a function of psychological reductionism and vain individualism but we know that other organizations can be oligarchical and lacking in insight. The shock here though is that psychologists are expected to at least reflect on their problems; they are allegedly experts on that reflection about individuals and groups. In practice this reflexivity has been notably absent in the culture of Leicester.

Fraud

Even today I meet BPS members who are unaware of the major fraud in the BPS. This is because it was not reported in The Psychologist or announced by the SMT or Board of Trustees. It was reported though in the Leicester Mercury (as was an arson attack at BPS HQ). So if a member wants to understand their professional organization they would do well to take this local newspaper rather than rely on BPS statements and publications.

The gist of the unedifying main story is that a woman who had numerous previous offences of the same type had used the BPS credit card for over £70K of spending (on amongst other things a cruise and Jimmy Choo shoes). After the fraud was eventually discovered and reported the offender was tried and sent to prison for 28 months. In court she reported that it was like being a ‘kid in a candy shop’.

A naïve outsider faced with this picture may well assume that those responsible for appointing her would be disciplined or sacked. They might also assume that as she was the PA of the CEO, the latter would have signed off fraudulent claims. They might also assume that oversight of financial probity would be the responsibility of the Finance Director. They might also assume that as well as the end-point offender being held to account in a court of law, that the legal liability or ethical culpability of other key players would be under scrutiny. These are all fair assumptions. So this is what happened in practice.

News of the fraud was buried in a line or two of the annual accounts as a minor irrelevance. No report of the organizational background to story was supplied to the membership. The CEO and Finance Director were suspended and placed under investigation. The former stayed suspended for a year and then returned and is still now in post. The latter went off to be employed by the National Lottery Community Fund within a month of his suspension (presumably with a reference dutifully given by someone in the BPS). He remains employed there. To date no one in a leadership role has offered a transparent (that word again) account to the world of what went so badly wrong about financial probity. Thus the only disciplinary consequence on public record has been the imprisonment of the PA. None of this drama has been reported or discussed in The Psychologist or any other BPS outlet. Silence has been the main cover-up tactic.

Here are the loose end questions that members and the general public may be interested in. Did the ‘Board of Trustees’ discuss the termination of employment of the CEO and FD? Were they unanimous in their decision to suspend them both? Did they examine the evidence related to the CEO’s sign offs of multiple fraudulent claims and the due diligence of his FD in overseeing those sign offs and confirming their legitimacy? Did they put in place plans to investigate who was responsible for the appointment of a convicted fraudster? Did the BoT suspend the two senior employees at once or did several months elapse between the fact of the fraud being known and their eventual suspension? If so why? Did the CEO return to post after a year because he was totally and unambiguously exonerated of any negligence or wrongdoing? Instead might his retained role be explained by another reason? Why have the members been given no answers to these questions? Does that silence reflect a norm of mystification in the BPS, which it turn reflects a failure of governance over decades?

And there is more. If the FD and CEO have had their salaried posts and reputations left unscathed by the fraud, what of the parallel drama at the time of the expulsion of Nigel MacLennan? Did he commit a criminal offence or was any form of illegality committed instead against him in relation to employment law, personal disparagement and his human rights? Soon we will find out the answers to these questions but not before the BPS leadership will pour even more into the legal costs sustaining their attack on MacLennan. Where will that money come from? (That question is rhetorical not open.)

Where is the evidence that he actually did anything wrong? Why did the video about his expulsion appear as an act of deliberate public humiliation on YouTube, fronted by the Acting Chair of the BoT, before MacLennan even had the time to appeal the decision (McGuinness, 2021)? Were those appointed to investigate the charge against him truly independent of vested interests in the BPS leadership? Do they today stand by their decision and approve of the YouTube posting? Any fair minded outsider would surely smell a rat about this scenario, unless all of the questions I posed above were answered in a convincing manner (rather than being spin or bullshit). This cues the next and final section.

Pollyanna spin doctors

The unreal culture of the BPS is fascinating. On the one hand its ‘officers’ send po-faced letters marked ‘private and confidential’ about minor bureaucratic details pertaining to an investigated complaint, which has typically run into the sands, as if they are gravely concerned about standards. On the other hand, they are quite happy to publicly trash people like Nigel MacLennan with impunity, as I have just noted. What ethical ‘standard’ was being applied precisely in his case? On the one had they say that complaints against individuals are not investigated by the BPS but on the other hand they deploy self-declared BPS junkies to pursue such an investigation, when it suits the interests of those in power. On the one hand they boast that ‘transparency’ is a key value of the organization and on the other hand they fail to report any event that might get in the way of the narrative that everything in Leicester is just fine and, if it is not, then improvements are just around the corner.

Whistling in the dark and pretending everything is fine and under control have attended the demise of the BPS in recent decades. Silence in The Psychologist and the weasel words of the anonymous apparatchiks of the Comms Team have always been on hand to maintain this madness with its underlying method or aim, but there are other key players. One group are those manifesting variants of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, noted above. However, at the top of the pyramid are the SMT and the Chair of the Board of Trustees. The latter used to come with the job of being the President. That is no longer the case as the role has now become merely ‘ambassadorial’.

This tweak might have passed the average member by but it is important. Now we have a new and independent chair and three independent colleagues. At last there has been some sign after years of Charities Commission pressure of a shift for the first time towards an independent Board. For now the majority are still old school appointees from the sub-systems, there by Masonic-style nod and a wink trickery. They still have conflicts of interest but this new picture is at least a start. A fully independent BoT would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for confronting the gross mismanagement and misdemeanors of the past, but note that it is a necessary condition.

Under this shift towards independent scrutiny, the old habit of Pollyanna spin from the SMT and Presidents is potentially now open to challenge. Maybe the stop button on the BPS bullshit generator might at long last be pressed by these newcomers. Sadly that is not what appears to be happening. The neophytes seem to have ‘gone native’. I have been in correspondence with David Crundwell, the new chair and he has been polite and he has replied at length. (This is an improvement on being totally ignored or threatened with disciplinary action, which was the stance of the SMT in recent years since BPSWatch emerged.)

I sent Mr Crundwell a copy of our book, at his request. He was concerned to anticipate what he called ‘accusations’ and I preferred to call ‘empirical facts’. I asked him to report any factual inaccuracies about the claims being made in the book but he declined on the grounds that it was all before his time. This is a bit odd, given that any of us can offer a view about anything that has happened in the past and drawn to our attention now in evidential detail (that is how the jury system works). I also asked him to join a panel at a launch of the book but he declined the invitation. Nobody from the SMT or BoT have yet complained about the facts recorded in the book, which is relevant for the historical record. Their silence is telling and a full debate with them would be intriguing for any listener.

On the positive side, Mr. Crundwell has agreed that the high rate of redactions still common in BPS Board meetings is incompatible with a spirit of transparency. He truly appreciates that claiming transparency and being transparent are not the same thing, which was an insight clearly lost on the old regime. And a certain degree of caginess is understandable, given that he has had to work with a dysfunctional leadership which was not of his choosing. However, sadly that caution has now tipped over into Pollyanna spin and so is compounding, not challenging, old bad habits.

Reasons to be cheerful with no rear view mirror

Ian Dury’s long shopping list of ‘reasons to be cheerful’ was tempered at the end by the wise caution of ‘perhaps next year or maybe even never’. Pollyanna managers are less sophisticated about the complex relationship between past, present and future. Patterns connect through time and old habits die hard. Stock-taking about the legacy of the past for naïve optimists is threatening to them because it gets in the way of their current rhetoric of shiny future prospects. It is dangerous for them because they are wrongheaded and so they will be prone to mismanage and be exposed for their folly. It is dangerous for others because it is misleading about unrecognized risks for the general good.

‘Reasons to be cheerful’ rhetoric means not having to deal with the grim reality of what has been inherited but living instead in a comforting imaginary world. Who can object to good intentions even if they may risk paving the way to hell? They sound plausible and are an example of the power of positive thinking but they are actually profoundly illogical at times. In Peter Barham’s poignant account of psychotic patients going ‘over the top’ in the First World War, oblivious to the dangers they were facing, being out of touch with reality meant making their vulnerable lives more, not less, risky (Barham, 2004).

A theme in my correspondence related to Mr. Crundwell’s preference not to look in the rear view mirror (his chosen metaphor not mine). In response I noted that a car minus a mirror will fail its MOT. My metaphor seemed to cut no ice. He wanted instead to look only optimistically to the road ahead. He even invited me to get in the car and enjoy the ride with other BPS members about ‘exciting prospects’ envisioned but not elaborated in any detail.

What Mr. Crundwell does not seem to understand is that in the rear view he is choosing to ignore, there are not only shocking past events but also impending and foreboding consequences. The reality of the past and the present and the future are bound up together in all open human systems. Any manager ignoring that truism is, to say the least, unwise. I did point this out to Mr. Crundwell (boringly and repeatedly) but my view was ignored. ‘Line drawing’ is just magical thinking. Forget complexity and focus on comforting future fantasies. The contempt this shows for the importance of history is jaw dropping.

Of course we have heard this ‘drawing a line’ sort of argument recently from Crundwell’s new colleagues. It came from the CEO and the then new President installed as a safe pair of hands to replace the expelled MacLennan, following the nifty imposed rule change that only allowed Senate members to be candidates. Carpenter and Bajwa (2021) then were singing the same refrain as Crundwell is now. I have no idea whether they coached him in a ‘party line’ or he came to the same unwise stance with no help from them (our correspondence was polite but not a mutual confessional).

The ‘drawing a line under the past’ management cliché undermines three linked imperatives for a healthy organization. The first is justice. Justice requires truth. Without truth there can be no redress for, and reconciliation about, historical wrongdoing. Hiding the detailed facts of the fraud or MacLennan’s kangaroo court expulsion helps few, other than those with the self-interested need to cover up the evidence of their past culpability.

Second, when those in power go into hiding, then trust is broken in them. If the BPS leaders do not report adverse events to members, why should the latter have any trust in them? When that trust breaks down some members stay and fight (as we have done), some become passive cynical onlookers and some resign in contempt for their professional and disciplinary body. New psychologists will be wary of joining a discredited organization. A measure of this in applied psychology has been the formation of others splinter groups (the AEP, ABP and ACP), where greater trust is invested. Another has been that now most psychologists registered with the HCPC are not BPS members.

Third, future improvements only come about as a result of organizational learning. That is why I have attacked the BPS for being an ‘organization without a memory’ (Pilgrim, 2023a; cf. Donaldson, 2002). A necessary outcome of that contrived amnesia is its need to produce organizational bullshit (Pilgrim, 2023b; Spicer, 2020). For example, those working in the NHS understand from painful experience the importance of critical incident reporting and constant reflection about lessons learned. When that duty (and it is a duty) of learning is evaded about the past, then we tend to have unnecessary deaths in the future. The consequences for critical incidents in the BPS may be less dramatic but they still implicate risks to the public, as we know in relation to policy capture.

Conclusion

The BPS is a kakistocracy. Those addicted to status, those using it as a cash cow and those expert at spin and bullshit to defend the indefensible, have aggregated in its culture in the past decades. They have been joined by a self-interested expansive management class. None of these have had any inclination to come clean about all of the matters that we in BPSWatch have insisted on unpicking in the past couple of years.

The next phase of decline, and maybe fall, awaits with leaders driving with no rear mirror. Tailgating the jaunty BPS car is a juggernaut of legal reckoning and the prospect of a scattering loss of those psychologists who have simply had enough of an implausible charity and professional body that has lost academic credibility. Any members left behind will continue to fund the antics of the kakistocrats. They would do well to ask for a detailed receipt.

References

Barham, P. (2004) Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War New Haven: Yale University Press.

Carpenter, K. and Bajwa, S. (2021) From the President and the CEO The Psychologist November.

Conway, A. (2023) BPS Policy Capture (2): selective ‘memory science’ and the betrayal of victims of abuse. In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Donaldson L. (2002) An organisation with a memory. Clinical Medicine Sep-Oct;2(5):452-7

Harvey, P. (2023) Resisting the silence of the cabal: resorting to social and alternative media. In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

McGuinness, C. (2021) The Society is at a Crossroads The Psychologist June 34, 4-5.

Miller, R. and Cornford, T. (2006) Double top – Ray Miller in discussion with Tim Cornford: The Society’s new President in discussion with the Chief Executive. How do their roles work together, and where do they see the Society going? The Psychologist April, 19, 20-21.

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) An organization without a memory? In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2023b) BPS Bullshit In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organizational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Spicer, A. (2020) Playing the bullshit game: how empty and misleading communication takes over organizations Organization Theory 1, 1-26

"The Psychologist", Board of Trustees, Change Programme, Charity Commission, Financial issues, Governance

The demise of the British Psychological Society, preparing for the autopsy

19th Jun 2023 AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts….

A bloated, incompetent, arrogant discredited learned and professional body is determinedly destroying itself. This post will assert that the BPS has passed a point of no return. It suffers from severe and seemingly intractable organisational dysfunction. There have been many signs of the body’s “organ failure” but much has also been hidden in the recent decade. What follows are some hints of what we know and what we have yet to find out. If and when there is an autopsy, hindsight will no doubt allow a fuller picture than members were ever able to piece together, and key players who have been silent may spill some beans.

Two and a half years ago I was one of the three alarmed colleagues, supported by a recently formed network of similarly frustrated long term members, who formed BPSWatch.com. We have posted nearly 70 blog articles examining instances of BPS dysfunction. We were immediately threatened with legal action when we reported something all subscribing members were entitled to know – that the CEO was suspended. The Head of Legal and Governance who made that threat to us formally in writing is no longer in post and has removed all reference to their employment by the BPS from LinkedIn. There is a back story there that cannot yet be told, but hopefully will emerge from the “wheels of justice that grind exceeding slow”.

There is another, as yet untold, back story as to why the CEO was subsequently able to return after a year’s gardening leave to his very highly paid post with apparent impunity. This was somewhat surprising since his Executive Assistant, appointed via expensive recruitment outsourcing, happened to be a fraudster with numerous previous convictions. They hadn’t done the checks. She proceeded to sneak through under his nose over a thousand fraudulent uses of a credit card for which he was responsible. Misconduct or gross misconduct on his part? Apparently not. She, however, was jailed. Thanks are due to the Leicester Mercury for reporting all this, since we were never given the basic facts by the BPS, let alone any lurid details of her £70k+ spoils of underwear, Jimmy Choos, hairdos, cruises and a new kitchen. The newspaper noted: “The prosecutor said it led to others being criticised for not correctly following procedures that may have prevented the fraud.”. Astonishing. And has there been any recompense sought from the clearly incompetent recruitment agency? We should be told.

It was also the Leicester Mercury who had previously reported that the BPS Offices were subject to an apparent arson attack being investigated by the police. Members were not told of that, neither by the tight-lipped BPS website nor by the treacly, sycophantic Fanzine that is The Psychologist. BPS News in the Round has been covered beyond local press by sporadic articles in The Times, The Telegraph and Third Sector, all behind paywalls, but it has required more regular updates from social media on my @psychsocwatchuk to give members some continuity of ideas about what is going on. I had to circumnavigate the suspensions of our first attempts at Twitter accounts owing to complaints that we were “impersonating” the BPS (truly LOL). So we have an active feed that puts out almost daily content to a following which is evidently much larger than the 1000+ prepared to be visible. Despite frequent appeals, The Psychologist has refused to remove its petty, petulant pointless block, which only serves better to make our case against its raison d’être. Frustrating. Silly. Childish.

This is just some of the very recent evidence of individual frailty and incompetence. But there are so many other back stories that members do not know about. These we will endeavour to pursue as the BPS heads towards the self-destruct coded into what can be read from the recent highly redacted minutes of the Board of Trustees. The stories are interesting because they demonstrate core psychological concerns about personality, motivation and group processes/dynamics. Obviously in play are power, ambition, defensiveness, hubris. Maybe a reductionist would be citing the three pillars of Money, Sex and Status. Here are some more of the back stories we have mused upon.

The tempting BPS credit card

Credit Card Story (1) – the really lurid tale of the first CEO. “Shush, we don’t talk about this”. Was there a non-disclosure agreement?
BPS Credit Card Story (2) – unbeknown to the Board of Trustees, someone senior leaves under another cloud, not long before…
BPS Credit Card Story (3) – the extraordinary spree of the fraudster whose card-work evaded not only the current CEO but also the Finance Director (FD). What fancy footwork was involved in this latter jointly suspended senior officer moving swiftly on and out of his suspension by the BPS, directly into a finance post in – wait for it – the National Lottery Community Fund? The same person who reassured the Board of Trustees that greater safeguards were in place after previous concerns.

“A kid in a candy shop” was the term used by the fraudster to describe to the court the temptations of laissez-faire easy access to credit card sprees. CEO and FD appear to have suffered no financial or status detriment.

Democracy Discomfited – undermining member-elected presidents

There are the untold stories of a number of presidents (and a DCP chair) that we know about over the last decade. These volunteer leaders, who were undermined, even threatened with legal action, had been forced to resign early and latterly one was expelled. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), recruited as consultants, recoiled and ran away from a toxic climate where there was serious conflict between senior managers and post-holding volunteer psychologists. Status and power battling it out?

Lashing out on lawyers

Members will be aghast if they ever finally find out how much has been spent on Betsan Criddle, Elena Misra, Newby Castleman etc, and how much is still being, and will be, spent on litigation relating to silencing and defaming a publicly expelled would-be reforming elected President. Costly defensiveness turbo-charged?

The Change Programme (heavy irony)

Or how to squander £6 million. The back story is how this was procured and how real benefits for members have NOT resulted. Suspicious?

Bloating

The back story here is how reckless overstaffing/salary escalation was achieved and how presidents were thwarted in questioning this. Resigning Vice-President David Murphy (he cites “rising staff costs resulting from increases both in staff numbers and senior staff salaries”; “staff costs risen by 73%”; “operating deficit”; “approved budget will be higher than the total income from basic membership and member network subscriptions combined”) has sounded the alarm on this to no apparent avail. A story lies behind the changing profile of more staff, less members, more political activism, less core concern about psychology. Narcissistic grandiosity?

Outsource, Outsource, Outsource

Get in consultants willy nilly. In some instances, get heavily criticised by them (NCVO, Korn Ferry). Get more defensive. Make heavy use of the Comms approach. Back stories will reveal how spin, denial and obfuscation trump reflection and learning. Transparent lack of transparency. PR Rules – OK?

Problem, what problem? Complaint, what complaint?

We have heard dozens of similar back stories from individual members who have persisted with concerns and have been ignored or worse – ominously threatened with having Member Conduct Rules used against them if they persist with “bullying and harassment”. DARVO is the acronym which describes what happens when you complain and the tables are turned against you. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender. In 2020, the Charity Commission wrote to me “We are currently engaging with the society over a number of issues and have found deficiencies in some areas of operation. Whilst I would expect the charity to have a robust and well managed complaints process, this may have not been the case in the past.”. When I challenged the BPS with this, they complained to the Charity Commission about their response to me. They DARVOed the Charity Commission.

Clearly there is also a back story of why and how the BPS subsequently revised the complaints procedure the way they did, so that now they will not investigate complaints about the content of a Society publication, a Society policy position, a Society decision to take, or not take, a particular course of action. A great society if it were not for the nuisance of members?

Not “sticking to the knitting” and becoming a society focussed on activism

There will be many back stories about policy formation when we come to understand in hindsight how loss of core purpose and defining philosophy took the BPS into trans activism, false memory campaigning and demands about the amount of Universal Credit the government should be giving to poor people.

Meanwhile, as indicated above, you won’t have been able to make a formal complaint about the political stances the Society took. Fundamental core purpose and philosophy of the BPS subverted?

Evidence leaking out – the Board of Trustees’ recent minutes

Members who understand the serious deficits in governance of the BPS may be holding out hope that the recent changes which have brought an independent chair of the Board of Trustees and 3 new independent trustee appointments will rein in the worst of organisational dysfunction and resultant cronyism and capture. Will those independent leaders be able to resist the machinations of the cabal still in residence, perceive and undo enough of the mess referred to above. Or is it too late?

If you are a BPS member you can read the minutes of the Board of Trustees but you will discover that they are remarkably like documents wrested from Whitehall, redacted on the grounds of national security. Members of our network who are/have been trustees of other charity organisations say that the level of redaction is extraordinary and clearly unjustifiable because there are usually clear and very limited grounds for deciding what needs to be redacted.

Taking the last two sets of minutes available since the independent chair was appointed, it is ascertainable (despite multiple unexplained redactions) that there are now being considered matters which should, in the current situation, raise very serious anxieties about the viability of the BPS. Below are listed some of the non-redacted matters from those minutes:

Well-being of volunteers.
Risk appetite: Operational, Legal, Property, Finance, Reputation.
Consultant use; some implication of less engagement and more judicious use than previously.
Contentious policy issues. How the society should engage with contentious issues on which “there will be strongly held divergent views among members and beyond”. BPS doesn’t always have to take the lead in order to reduce its risk, i.e. take cover with others?
Reputational Risk referred to and clearly related to the above
Poor customer care: concerns from members
Sustainability of the Organisation: Responsibilities to staff (implies overstaffing at the level it is now?)
Membership loss: membership down significantly
Finance: “October management accounts show an income shortfall of £1.26m (13%) against budget. Over 90% of this is due to member subscriptions. Costs are being tightly controlled. Operating deficit at year end is expected to be about £1.9m. Overall deficit is currently £3.9m. Investments are currently £10.6m after withdrawal of £1.7m to repay the CBILS loan and realised and unrealised valuation losses of £1.1m.”. Not healthy at all. David Murphy’s resignation letter had sounded the warning.
Possible HQ Property Sales: maybe London office because they refer to Peldon Rose, a specialist London firm. Minutes refer to “the need for a ‘visible and physical presence’ for the organisation, and that the future of the properties should be seen as part of a wider coherent strategy for the organisation. Any decisions about use of assets should be aligned to the charitable objects, and the Charity Commission guidance on property disposals. The Chair observed that a number of issues had been raised which were linked to the broad question of sustainability of the organisation; and it was good practice to review all assets and whether they are being utilised in the most effective way for the benefit of members and the organisation’s said charitable objectives.”.

The Future, Any Future?

In our forthcoming book British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Editor: David Pilgrim (2023) https://firingthemind.com/product/9781800131842/ I express a pessimistic view about the survival of the BPS, believing it fails to meet the needs of its existing and potential future membership and membership is confirmed as significantly falling in number. As existing members register discontent by voting with their feet and removing their subscriptions, the organisation is showing no signs of becoming more transparent and receptive to the expressed concerns of its remaining subscribers. It has pursued a number of high profile and contentious policy positions outwith the balance and authority expected of a learned and professional body. It has attracted bad publicity accordingly. Its shop-front magazine The Psychologist has failed to properly inform readers about BPS matters, remains highly conflict averse and clearly captured on one side of current contentious debates, suppressing discussion of alternative views. It is, in a word, “boring”.

At the end of the day, however. It will be The Money that “does for the BPS”.

It will not be able to afford itself.

"The Psychologist", Board of Trustees, Charity Commission, Expulsion of President-Elect, Governance

On the ghostly contributions of Carroll, Orwell, Idle and Pirandello

15th Feb 2023 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…..

Quite soon students in management schools will be offered on a plate a perfect example of a dysfunctional organisation (Pilgrim, 2023a). After two years of our campaign to expose poor governance and corruption in the BPS, telling the world what its leaders have preferred to keep under wraps, what have we experienced and concluded?

A short answer is that it feels like moving constantly between Alice in Wonderland and 1984. The vertigo this creates is partly because of the complexity of what we are dealing with. That is a legitimation crisis (Jost and Major, 2001; Habermas, 1975), with its roots in both history and a reproduced leadership legacy culture which survives, albeit precariously, by routinely evading transparency and denying pervasive conflicts of interest.

A sketch of the legitimation crisis

Those members who engage with what is wrong with the Society now distrust its managers and for very good reason. Most others either do not bother being critical, leave in despair, or they are kept in the dark. Accordingly, we have a largely docile membership, which is reflected in the poor turn out for Presidential elections.

The CV advantages of passive membership is a collusive factor, which has given a free pass to the old oligarchy and the newer management class controlling the BPS. The rise of this class, between capital and labour, is not new. However, its power has been amplified by neoliberalism and the norm of the New Public Management (NPM) approach to organisational leadership for now (Smith, 2014; Gruening, 2001; cf. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979).

The oligarchical norm, post-1965, merging uncomfortably with NPM, post-2000, intensified rather than solved the legitimation crisis. Over the past few years there has been Charity Commission ‘engagement’, which has triggered some small reforms in the Board of Trustees, though even they are regressive (see below).

The BPS managers do announce their decisions, post hoc, on the website, which is labyrinthine. The members have few direct mailings about important headline matters and the The Psychologist is light touch. The President and CEO get to portray their view of the world but ordinary or extraordinary events in Leicester are simply not reported. As the editor has told us for emphasis in the most recent edition, it is proudly, ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’. Always loyal to the SMT and BoT, it does a version of that job very well indeed.

The local press fills in this complicit silence from ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’. The Psychologist offers a nearly bare noticeboard and only good news is permitted. Compare that stance with these reports in the Leicester Mercury: (https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/arson-investigation-launched-after-blaze-2490769; https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/trusted-worker-blew-70k-charitys-6618893

Killer joke or suicide note?

In all honesty, the BPS is basically a joke: it is neither a learned nor learning organisation. In fact the organisational state of the Society is so laughable that it recalls the Monty Python sketch from 1969 about the funniest joke in the world. It was so hilarious that one might die laughing on hearing it, as Eric Idle’s mother and the constables did, first on the scene. Eric Scribbler died laughing writing it, which might be prescient for the authors of their own demise in Leicester.

If the enormity of the tragi-comedy which the BPS has become was grasped in its entirety, we risk the same mortal inevitability. Here though we have no single authorial source like Eric Scribbler, merely several key players and in turn this recalls Pirandello’s absurdist Six Characters In Search of An Author. These could include its surviving CEO and his partner in Pollyanna optimism, turning our attention away instrumentally from a corrupt past (Carpenter and Bajwa, 2021).

They could include its oligarchs who, with no insight, have confused hanging around for longer than is healthy, for either membership democracy or the public good, with ‘serving’ the Society. See for example Professor Ann Colley, who was unique as both a CEO for a while and also BPS President. On her retirement another oligarch Professor Carole Allan (President and appointed Honorary General Secretary for while) said this of Colley in The Psychologist 2017, without a hint of irony or insight:

Ann served twice as Honorary General Secretary. The first time was for three years from 1989, when membership of the Society stood at 13,000. The second time was from 2003 to 2008. In between she was elected to serve as President, which office she held in 1993/94. Ann was circumspect about what Presidents can achieve in their short term of office when she was interviewed for The Psychologist, pointing out that initiatives usually only bear fruit after two or three years.

Colley’s modest ambitions for Presidents made sense as a survival strategy in an incorrigibly dysfunctional organisation. Other self-confessed ‘BPS junkies’ (see Miller and Cornford, 2006) offer us no real evidence what to ‘serve’ actually means: serving whom, about what and to what end?

The re-purposed Pirandello play could include the Society’s bombastic leaders from the past, who confused the ego-inflation that came with becoming a professional regulator with organisational probity, while failing to spot that they had created a faux ‘Board of Trustees’. This was not even vaguely independent but was instead awash with conflicts of interest (Newman, 1988).

Maybe it could also include the renegade leaders, who went off on their own to form the Associations of Educational Psychologists, Business Psychologists and Clinical Psychologists in 1963, 2000 and 2017 respectively. They were tired of an arcane self-serving oligarchy that held membership democracy in contempt. And then there are the authors of BPS policies who have betrayed victims of child sexual abuse (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). Or how about the twice President Cyril Burt, with his mixed posthumous reviews? How about his student, Hans Eysenck, in the eugenic UCL tradition, who is still subject to an unresolved investigation (Burt, 1912; Craig, Pelosi and Tourish, 2021; Galton, 1881; Marks, 2019; Pearson, 1904; Pelosi, 2019; Pilgrim, 2008 and 2023b)?

To be fair Eysenck was not a BPS oligarch, though he was a character of both notoriety and adoration. For anyone missing this one, the first to blow the whistle to the BPS was the psychiatrist Anthony Pelosi in 1995, but his request for an inquiry was ignored. This inaction was also evident from Kings College London (Eysenck’s legacy employer) but eventually they got their act together to set up an independently chaired review of the dubious research. Spin forwards to 2019, when KCL eventually acted. The BPS was still silent. The CEO was asked to deal with the Eysenck ‘problem’ by the editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, David Marks, who had successfully pricked the conscience or at least the utilitarian wisdom of KCL. Bajwa did not even bother replying to Marks, which was a common stance of wilful blindness at the time (we have a record of other, multi-signed letters he simply ignored from members).

Some of us now know the context of this weird obliviousness of the CEO, as he had other fish to fry at the time. Without detective effort, the membership were simply left bemused by the absence of common courtesy from the CEO. Three years later, yes three years later, Dr Rachel Scudamore, his subordinate, issued an apology to the complainant for the non-reply but no explanation was offered. Marks has now resigned from the BPS after being a member for over fifty years and has just launched an excoriating attack of the organisation in print (Marks, 2023).

A final Pirandello-style inclusion might be the ex-President, David Murphy, who with two others leaving over a two month period in 2021 felt moved to put his resignation letter on Twitter. Here it is for those who missed it:

This lengthy account from Murphy speaks for itself. However, given that he was arguably an insider in the oligarchy (note his allusion to his 35 year involvement and continuous roles for over 20 years), it is significant that he resigned so publicly and was so critical of his colleagues on the BoT. Damning the organisation with faint praise, while simultaneously washing its dirty linen in public in one defining public performance, reveals the legitimation crisis that leaders in the BPS were denying existed. ‘Problem what problem?’ was the norm, though we were told tantalisingly, with no detail attached, that it had been a ‘challenging year’ (McGuinness, 2021).

At the time of Murphy’s resignation the BoT were adopting a ‘damage limitation exercise’, with its ‘Comms Team’ in overdrive. Managers resort to this particular version of bullshit when the going gets tough, as it does fairly regularly in the BPS. In early 2021, they had to deal with the fraud and so the The Psychologist was dutifully silent. There was at the time an ongoing police inquiry, a suspended CEO and a Chief Finance Officer who had hastily departed, while under investigation. He now works for the National Lottery Community Fund.

The public and ordinary members at the time were oblivious to all of these machinations, until the local, and then eventually the national, press reported and commented. As noted above, the Chair of the BoT pleaded for sympathy, understandably, about a ‘challenging year’ in The Psychologist (McGuinness, 2021). The details of why it had been challenging were, of course, glossed over though MacLennan’s public trashing on Youtube – before his appeal was even heard – was pompously retained, so we all got the message. Whistle blowers tend not to fare well after doing their public duty, so the BoT of the time may look now to their consciences about this intervention, which they approved knowingly (Morgan, 2014).

Unlike the Pirandello play, maybe the dramatis personae for the sad tale of the BPS need to be more than half a dozen, as there are quite a few contenders. The oligarchical culture that keeps reproducing itself seems to be beyond the awareness or defiance of particular actors. It really is not easy to identify those who have been singularly or disproportionately responsible for the legitimation crisis today. However, one thing that is absolutely certain is that Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ applies in buckets in the culture of the BPS.

Indeed the level of hypocrisy is so bizarre that, unwittingly, the rhetoric of official BPS policies becomes a checklist of interest to prospective whistle blowers and to students of dysfunctional organisations. The bullshit culture now running through the BPS, like Blackpool rock, beggars belief. Three illustrative examples will be given in relation to its policies on conflicts of interest, values and the investigation of complaints. All of these worthy documents, when tested out for their actual practice, demonstrate that the leaders in the BPS say one thing and do another with consummate ease.

Conflicts of interest and the good sense of the NCVO

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) withdrew from offering advice on future strategy for fear that its own consultants might be at risk of harm from the toxic culture in the BPS (Farrow and Potkins, 2020). Again few members will be aware of this damning verdict. However, the NCVO does give us all free advice on its website on how a Board of Trustees (bearing in mind that this is still a misnomer in the BPS) should deal with conflicts of interest.

“Identifying, dealing with and recording conflicts of interest/loyalty

The board understands how real and perceived conflicts of interests and conflicts of loyalty can affect a charity’s performance and reputation.
Trustees disclose any actual or potential conflicts to the board and deal with these in line with the charity’s governing document and a regularly reviewed conflicts of interest policy.
Registers of interests, hospitality and gifts are kept and made available to stakeholders in line with the charity’s agreed policy on disclosure.
Trustees keep their independence and tell the board if they feel influenced by any interest or may be perceived as being influenced or to having a conflict.”

The Society’s own conflict of interest policy is aligned with these broad aspirations but here is the rub. The conflicts of interest that are embedded in the appointment norm since 1965 mean that the BoT is rife with them and yet no one on the Board seems to be aware of that fact or is wilfully blind to it. Moreover, despite news of the recent appointment of an independent chair, old habits die hard.

Recently the advertisements for Chairs Board, with short periods of notice for applicants allotted, still include the assurance they will be appointed automatically onto the BoT. The appointment norm and its implicit celebration of a conflicts of interest is so ingrained in the culture of the BPS that the beneficiaries will tend to experience pride not angst or guilt about their role. This lack of insight means membership democracy and public accountability are given barely a glance.

After pressure for reform from the Charity Commission, the BoT, being the wounded dinosaur structure it is, began to realise slowly that the game was up on the old model, with its total lack of independent oversight. Bajwa (November 2022) made this emollient announcement to accommodate the problem, tucked away on the BPS website:

Traditionally, our Board of Trustees has almost exclusively been made up of members, who bring the in-depth knowledge of the organisation and psychology that is needed to make big decisions about the society’s future.

Unlike many similar organisations, however, we have not recruited externally for trustees, and we haven’t specifically looked for people with expertise in areas which are crucial to the organisation’s success but not necessarily directly related to psychology.

Bullshit is about all that is said and not said to disguise the reality of what those in power are up to (Frankfurt, 2005). Note how Bajwa acknowledges (so does not query) the dysfunctional, and at times catastrophic, lack of independent oversight from the past. Instead this is turned into a sort of traditional wisdom, not a confessed foolhardiness.

The old regime of power allegedly entailed ‘in-depth knowledge’, not the vested interests of oligarchs and their fellow travellers. They made ‘big decisions’ (wow!). This Trump-like phrasing signals gravitas (heavy is the head that bears the crown) but it is conveniently short on detail. In truth these ‘big decisions’, included keeping the legitimation crisis under wraps and using a kangaroo court to expel an internal critic. They included the norm of persecuting any incoming President who attempted to change what was rotten in the state of Leicester (MacLennan was not a one-off case). The comparison with other third sector organisations by Bajwa implies some sort of respectable or unremarkable option appraisal, rather than a total failure to comply with charity law expectations of good governance. The BPS have been out of step and out of order in the third sector landscape for decades.

So, Bajwa tells us, three new independent Trustees are to come in but the majority will still be appointees from within the BPS. And it gets worse. The one and only part of the BoT that traditionally has been elected not appointed, the Presidential triumvirate, is now to be removed; again most of the membership will become aware of this after the event. The President will now only provide an ‘ambassadorial’, not a leadership, role on the BoT. This means a regressive not progressive reform to embed, not break up, the cabal.

On this note, remember that after the expulsion of Nigel MacLennan, the BoT simply invented a new rule that excluded candidature from the general membership. This ensured a safe pair of hands (Carpenter) because only BoT members or Senate members were now eligible. This pre-empted a new version emerging of a turbulent President like MacLennan, who might, heaven forbid, ‘say “no” to power’ (Fromm, 2010).

Another example of the bullshit character of the Society’s conflicts of interest policy in practice relates to the CEO himself. If anyone, member or public, wants to complain about him to the BoT they encounter the invented rule that all communications to the BoT are received and dealt with by……the CEO. Bear in mind that a CEO should be accountable to a BoT, not be an arbitrating gatekeeper deciding the relevance of business presented to it. At this point maybe Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 should be added to our list of literary resonances.

Espoused values

Part of the killer joke of the BPS is its capacity to posture about organisational values. Here is the virtue-signalling posing, on the record, which was applicable at the time of the fraud, its cover up and the deafening silence about organisational learning since then:

“Our values are central to the way we work to achieve our core purposes. We aim to work in a culture of:

• rigour and fairness;

• honesty and integrity;

• transparency;

• respect for a diversity of viewpoints;

• the highest standards of professionalism and ethical behaviour, attitudes and judgements, as laid out in our Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

There is nothing wrong with this Kantian checklist at all. The problem is that the BPS culture in practice is at total odds with its spirit and detail. The best hoodwinks are the ones that brazenly claim the very opposite of reality, which is a hallmark of our ‘post-truth’ era (Porpora, 2020).

Would rigour and fairness describe the selective investigation of Nigel MacLennan, while members of the public contacting the BPS were told that it does not investigate complaints against individual members?

Would honesty and integrity apply to the fact that not a single person at the top of the organisation has been held responsible for appointing a serial fraudster, who is now in jail after being appointed to be the PA of the CEO?

Would transparency cover the complicit silence of The Psychologist about both routine BPS business and the scandals that abound in the recent and distant past?

Would respect for a diversity of views cover the policy capture by some groups, at the expense of others, in relation to the controversial gender document and that covering memory and law?

Would the ‘highest standards’ claim extend to the BoT and SMT? In what sense have they behaved honourably in this regard? When answering that, just look at the beans spilt by Murphy in his resignation letter. This checklist is fine in theory but in practice it is simply bovine ordure extraordinaire (Hardy, 2021).

The vagaries of trying and failing to make a complaint

Recently this matter has gone backwards (rather like the BoT membership one) not forwards. Here is what Dr Rachel Scudamore (‘Head of Quality Assurance and Standards’) has just told us about the new, allegedly improved, complaints procedure, which states in Section B.3 that:

“ 3. The policy is not appropriate for addressing the following issues:

a. disagreement with the content of a Society publication;

b. disagreement with a Society policy position;

c. disagreement with a Society decision to take, or not take, a particular course of action.”

So, if a BPS publication contains material against the public interest or at odds with academic probity, then members cannot complain formally. If a policy endangers vulnerable people or is at odds with ethical practice, then members cannot complain formally. If those leading the organisation make questionable or unwise decisions (such as employing someone with a publicly known history of fraud), then members cannot complain formally. The new document is another cabal stitch up in order to block transparency and accountability. It is one of innumerable current examples of organisational bullshit, which permeates the BPS (Spicer, 2020; Christensen, Kärreman and Rasche, 2019).

Members will not be able to make a complaint about BPS policy, as they did in the past, even if it was then typically ignored. The CEO was a master non-reply role model but that wilful blindness will no longer be even required, because some complaints will simply will not be investigated in principle.

Indeed one wonders what anyone can now complain about formally, given the self-serving exclusion clauses. The members were never well served by the old policy on complaints (this was a central concern of the Charity Commission) but now the cabal are being boastfully unaccountable. Elements of the killer joke just keep emerging to threaten our wellbeing and the diminishing prospect of a learning organisation and democracy in the BPS.

We wait to see how the BPS will partition off its new and proud recapture of its regulatory powers. This is now about to be extended to a tranche of mental health workers, who may not even be psychology graduates. This will require the BPS doing something it did prior to ceding its disciplinary powers to the HCPC after 2003: it must reconstruct a credible investigatory and disciplinary infrastructure. That must be rule-bound, truly transparent and credible to the Professional Services Authority, who I believe have unwisely blessed the new regulatory powers of an incompetent and dysfunctional organisation.

If this happens, as surely it has to, will that infrastructure now be applicable to all of the BPS membership? Will those complaining, say against academic psychologists, no longer be batted away with the advice to contact the employing university? Will all those self-employed practitioners confecting ways of working around HCPC registration now come under a new investigatory process?

As they say, “don’t hold your breath”. My hunch is that the managers will think selectively and instrumentally, which they do with great ease. There will probably be one rule for the new tranche to tick the box for the PSA and the rest will be left alone but under the straight-jacket of the new complaints procedure, with its exclusion clauses. And how about complaints against BPS managers themselves? (I have already rehearsed the Joseph Heller and Lewis Carroll rule about the CEO receiving complaints about himself.)

The bullshit checklist of the values noted above finishes on an ambiguous note. Its focus is actually about members but do the staff have another code of practice and can we see it please? Is it the same as the final values point or a different one? How about the conflicted role of the editor of The Psychologist and his understandable selective attention to scandals in the BPS and his routine noticeboard of Pollyanna news about the future from the BPS leadership? He is employed by the BPS, which explains much. Anyone trying to complain about his editorial policies, favouring BPS propaganda, is faced with an uphill task (Harvey, 2023).

Concluding advice

Watch this space, as the absurdist play unfolds. Keep reading the Leicester Mercury.

References

Burt, C.L. (1912) The inheritance of mental characters. Eugenic Review IV, 1-33.

Carpenter, K. and Bajwa, S. (2022) From the President and Chief Executive. The Psychologist January 4-5.

Christensen, L.T., Kärreman, D. and Rasche, A. (2019) Bullshit and organization studies. Organization Studies. 40(10):1587-1600;

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176

Craig, R., Pelosi, A. and Tourish, D. (2021) Research misconduct complaints and institutional logics: the case of Hans Eysenck and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Health Psychology, 26, 2, 296-3

Ehrenreich, B. and Ehrenreich, J. (1979) The Professional Managerial Class. In P. Walker (ed) Between Labor and Capital, South End Press, Boston.

Farrow, A. and Potkins, J. (2020) British Psychological Society: Strategy Consultancy Set Up Phase Report November 2020 London: NCVO

Frankfurt, H. (2005) On Bullshit Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fromm, E. (2010) On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying ‘No’ To Power London: Harper

Galton, F. (1881) Natural Inheritance London: Macmillan

Gruening, G, (2001) Origin and theoretical basis of new public management, International Public Management Journal 4, 1, 1-25,

Jost, J. and Major, B. (2001) (eds). The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis Boston: Beacon Press.

Hardy, N. (2021) Catcher in the lie: resisting bovine ordure in social epistemology Journal of Critical Realism 20, 2, 125-145.

Harvey, P. (2023) Resisting the silence of the cabal: resorting to social and alternative media. In Pilgrim, D. (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Marks, D. F. (2023). A catalogue of shame: the British Psychological Society as a dysfunctional organisation. Journal of Educational and Psychological Research 5,, 1, 575-587.

Marks, D.F. (2019). The Hans Eysenck affair: time to correct the scientific record Journal of Health Psychology, 24, 4: 409-20.

McGuinness, C. (2021) The Society is at a Crossroads The Psychologist June 34, 4-5.

Morgan, J. (2014) Life after whistleblowing. Times Higher Education Supplement July 31^st

Newman, C. (1988) Evolution and Revolution Charter guide, occasional paper. Leicester: British Psychological Society

Pearson, K. (1904) On the inheritance of mental and moral characteristics in man. Biometrika IV, 265-303.

Pelosi, A.J. (2019). Personality and fatal diseases: revisiting a scientific scandal. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(4), 421-439

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2023b) Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology History of the Human Sciences Online January 5th.

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-84.

Porpora, D.V. (2020) Populism, citizenship, and post-truth politics, Journal of Critical Realism, 19, 4 329-340.

Smith, D. (2014). Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-line Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Spicer, A. (2020) Playing the bullshit game: how empty and misleading communication takes over organizations Organization Theory 1, 1-26

"The Psychologist", Board of Trustees, Governance

Getting away with it…

26th Aug 202226th Aug 2022 AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts…..

Viola Sander, languishes at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The BPS Board of Trustees (BoT) languishes in a complacent and denialist miasma of self-indulgence whilst the organisation for which it is accountable slips further and further into an abyss. As yet another crisis hits an already tottering and failing society (see here) the membership – to which the BoT is accountable – is left bewildered and confused at yet another resignation from the Presidential team. As David Murphy (ex-President who resigned as Vice-President) notes, only one of the past six Presidents had completed their full 3-year term. As Oscar Wilde didn’t say “To lose one President, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness, but to lose any more is sheer incompetence…”. And now another one has gone – in record time.

But to return to the fate of the ex-Executive Assistant to the CEO whose fraudulent use of a BPS credit card landed her a custodial sentence (full details here). Clearly she had broken the law (again) but are there others who should shoulder some of the responsibility if not the blame? The Charity Commission states

As a trustee you must take steps to make sure that your charity’s money is safe, properly used and accounted for. Every trustee has to do this. Even if your charity has an expert to manage its finances, you are still responsible for overseeing your charity’s money.

Further

Make sure that money is only spent on what is allowed by the charity’s governing document and policies. If it is not, you and the other trustees need to put it right.

It could not be clearer – trustees have a responsibility and they are accountable. So how has the BPS BoT taken these edicts? They have not. No Trustee has resigned about this critical failure (I do not include David Murphy of Hazel McCloughlin here as they had many other reasons) and, as far as we know (see later for a view on information blackouts) no member of the Senior Management Team has been disciplined. Whilst the CEO was suspended for a year whilst this was subject an investigation (again no details about how this was done), the then CFO was allowed to resign and immediately took up a post with the National Lottery Community Fund.

In an attempt to clarify matters, I wrote to the then President (Katherine Carpenter) prior to this year’s AGM as follows

Dear Dr Carpenter,

I was pleased to see your statement about the encouragement of debate, as I was to read of your commitment to openness and transparency when the CEO was re-instated. In the light of this I hope that you will take the opportunity at the AGM to give the membership a fuller account of the recent fraud than has been given up to this point – it is appalling that we have more information from the local media than we do from the Society or its own house journal.

In particular, I hope that you will be able to clarify the following:

1. Why has no-one from the Board of Trustees resigned? It is a clear (and statutory) responsibility for Trustees to be accountable for the financial health and probity of an organisation. Why has no-one taken their responsibility seriously?

2. Why has no-one on the SMT been (as far as we know) disciplined or held accountable?

3. How was the then CFO able to resign whilst still (as far as we know) suspended pending the outcome of the internal investigation and gain another senior post with another charity?

Members are entitled to answers to these questions – you and your colleagues are accountable to them. And we need more than bland clichés that “lessons have been learned” and that “systems are now in place”. Financial mismanagement is not new to the BPS and it is clearly a significant failure of systems and accountability that the fraud went undetected for so long.

I look forward to your reply.

To this I got no reply, not even an acknowledgement.

And these are not the only outstanding questions surrounding this scandal. Viola Sander’s appointment was handled by an external agency. Why? Despite the fact that members pay a significant amount of money to service a bureaucracy which cost nearly £7 million in 2021 (which presumably includes HR), why wasn’t this done in-house? The BPS has a significant membership of occupational, business and other applied psychologists who are likely to have considerable expertise in selection procedures. Perhaps some of them actually run businesses which specialise in selection. Why not use this expertise? And what recompense has the BPS sought for this gross and crass incompetence on the part of the “external agency”. I would have thought that the BPS has a prima facie case for not only asking for their (i.e.members’) money back but a considerable sum in reputational damages.

I referred earlier to the information blackout. Whilst accepting that some material may be confidential, there is nothing to stop the BPS issuing a carefully worded statement to the membership – isn’t that what the Comms Team is there for? And perhaps a statement to be printed in The Psychologist – but that is an extremely unlikely event considering that such basic information about the Society doesn’t fit its virtue-signalling, identity-politics, activist-placating agenda.

So we are none the wiser, the same old faces sit on the BoT in their self-satisfied smugness whilst the Society for which they are responsible crumbles around them.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Expulsion of President-Elect, Gender, Governance, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group, Prescribing Rights

Legal storm clouds over the BPS

16th Aug 2022 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

For those new to the chaos in the BPS, its organisational vulnerability today is multi-layered. The Charity Commission has, until very recently, been ‘engaged’ with the Society about lack of compliance concerning governance arrangements. Slowly, maybe resentfully, the leadership in Leicester has tinkered around the edges.

The Society’s ‘Board of Trustees’ has been a phoney structure since the 1960s, but now a few public invites are to be issued, to appoint nominally independent members. All trustees in a charity should have no conflicts of interest, not just a couple of tokens. As with other matters, the BPS leadership seems to lack insight about even the most basic principles of organisational probity (see below).

But compliance with charity law is the least of the problems for the current BPS leadership or, note, past leaders with their ongoing legacy liability. We were told via YouTube, when Nigel MacLennan was expelled kangaroo-court-style, that this has been a ‘challenging year’. This of course was special pleading from those running the Society. The wider membership had been kept completely in the dark about the corruption and misgovernance, so they experienced the lock down, oblivious to any personal pain suffered by the leadership, with its ‘challenges’.

This glib ‘challenging year’ trope in BPS propaganda has persisted, both vague in its detail and directed at sympathy from anyone taking it seriously. Covid-19 had been a safe cover story of collective bad luck and victimhood. Whichever way the challenges in Leicester are spun to the outside world, the reality is that the BPS is in serious legal trouble.

Three imminent legal threats to the reputation of the BPS

Here are three points to consider seriously:

1 Nigel MacLennan’s Employment Tribunal will require that the BPS must now take the dirty washing it has stuffed in a bin bag and put in a cupboard somewhere, and empty it out on to the floor of the courtroom for all the world to see. The evasions and snail-pace adjustments, which might have worked in response to the Charity Commission, will not be tolerated in a court (which is the formal status of an Employment Tribunal). Much more could be said on this, but a sub judice caution comes into play here, so I am just reporting the material fact of what is about to happen in 2023.

2 Post-Cass Review and Post-GIDS closure, the BPS guidance on gender has now been withdrawn. The leadership are not responding, in a timely manner, to a dilemma shockingly new to them. In the autumn of 2019 criticisms I made of Tavistock Clinic GIDS were censored by the BPS. In the summer of 2020, representations from many BPS members about the serious inadequacies of the 2019 guidelines on gender were simply ignored. In the autumn of 2020, a detailed formal complaint concerning the form, content and context of 2019 revision of the gender guidelines was made but not upheld. Also in autumn 2020, further representations about the risks of extending prescribing rights to psychologists (which would have included hormones) were ignored by BPS leaders. In the spring of 2022, yet another multi-signed letter to BPS leaders about the risks posed to the public by the gender guidelines was simply ignored. This did not even receive an acknowledgment, let alone a considered response.

Only when the world outside was telling Leicester in stereo, and at full volume, that the game was up on the ‘affirmative model’, was action triggered. Over the recent years, its own members had been treated with total contempt, when lobbying for the withdrawal of the trans-captured gender document. The wise have kept a copy of the policy document now removed. It cannot be deleted from history, no matter how convenient that would be for all of those, from the Board of Trustees and the Practice Board to the ‘Comms Team’ and The Psychologist, who were complicit actors in a flawed policy.

The credibility of their group-think will now fracture in the full public glare of legal scrutiny. Recently The Times reported an incipient class action, involving up to a thousand ex-patients of the Tavistock Clinic (in truth that figure may be larger or smaller). Whatever their number, the legal bill will be picked up by the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA). Its work is supported by top-sliced money from constituent local Trusts, so it is supplied ultimately by the tax payer.

The Tavistock Clinic will survive, albeit embarrassed. It will be rid of a capricious historical deviation, which held the proven tradition of cautious exploratory psychological therapy in complete contempt, confusing a passing and modish social trend with a genuine ‘social revolution’. The medical sterilisation of healthy children is shaping up to be yet another ‘great and desperate cure’ in the murky biomedical history of psychiatry (and now, more importantly, psychology) (Valenstein, 1986). These children, who cannot vote, give consent to sex, buy alcohol or even have a piercing or tattoo at their own request, has been put forward by adult identity politics activists as a harbinger of social progress.

In the censored exchange in 2019 and noted above, between me and Dr Bernadette Wren, that assumption of political and ethical worthiness was debated. As a champion of the now discredited GIDS, Wren actually described the explosion in referrals as reflecting a ‘social revolution’ (sic). I am sure she believed that, but history will surely not vindicate her position, given that her claim is already unravelling and there is a service policy push back, here and in other countries, about the ‘affirmative model’. Social contagion, yes. Social revolution, very doubtful. A passing postmodern phase of anti-realist madness, most probable.

Many liberal and left leaning people (this is not just a Daily Mail editorial frothing at the mouth) simply never bought the GIDS progressive claims. Nor did they fail to spot the trans-capture in the BPS and elsewhere, including in the Royal medical colleges, which should have known better. For example, a group have just written to The Observernoting how the leadership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists had fended off representations, similar to our own in the BPS (see under heading Trans Concerns) https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2022/aug/14/why-surprise-when-wealthy-capitalist-makes-large-donation-to-oxford-college

This span of dissenting voices has now been vindicated. Complex existential challenges, each with their unique biographical context, cannot be cured by crass interference with the body, but it seems that mental health professionals are still slow learners. Their organisational leaders, fawning for popular support in an age of identity politics, have for now often lost their rational capacity to assess evidence or accept material realities that are immutable (Pilgrim, 2022).

Faced with this historical moment of reckoning, the BPS does not have the luxury of a legal fund, like the NHSLA, to fall back on. The grateful medical negligence lawyers, who are now welcoming ‘regretters and detransitioners’ through their shiny doors, will inevitably take an interest in the professional advice that supported the ‘affirmative model’, now defunct at the Tavistock. The cabal in Leicester would be wise to take their own legal advice about what is in the pipeline. It will of course be paid for by members’ fees. It may well entail very large amounts of money.

3 And then there is the contentious memory and law group, which has been the other main arena of policy capture, afforded by weak governance. The enmeshment of the BPS and the British False Memory Society is now clear (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). However, in 2014, the editor of The Psychologist made this definitive and untenable statement: “Neither The Psychologist nor The British Psychological Society has links with the British False Memory Society.”

This denial was at odds with the fact that the Chair (now deceased) of the BPS Memory and the Law Group was on the Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society, during the time that Elizabeth Loftus was on the International Panel of Associate Editors of The Psychologist. She was also an advisor to the US and British False Memory Societies (The first was closed down after the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Loftus testified in defence of both Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021 and Harvey Weinstein in 2020. In the first case she asserted, with no evidence, that the prospect of financial gain could distort the memories of complainants. This line of speculation in legal settings is not peculiar to Loftus. It has been used by convicted individual abusers, as well as those claiming that child sexual abuse is a moral panic.

In this context of the serious legal considerations of sexual abuse, the biases in the BPS policy to date are very important, as is the supportive role of The Psychologist. In May 2014, its editor provided a short hagiographic account of his interview with Loftus (he met at a conference dinner), who had ‘been voted the most influential female psychologist of all time’. It goes on, ‘Her wit and creativity shone through as she rattled through real-life stories, wrongful convictions and ingenious research that all illuminate the faulty nature of memory…. One thing seems undeniable: whatever the future brings for memory research and practice, Professor Loftus will be at the forefront of it for many years to come.’

Because the BPS is an organisation without a memory, others have to recall the origins of its partisan policy focus. The BPS line, from their highly biased report, considering only the matter of false positive decision making, has fed defence teams hired by those accused of sexual abuse. It has offered absolutely no balancing advice about false negatives, in order to support prosecution teams. Those in the BPS, who have been concerned to expand the policy on memory, to include evidence of the social epidemiology of child sexual abuse and its proven mental health impacts (e.g. Cutajar et al. 2010) have been systematically excluded from a new working group looking at the topic.

This scandal of biased policy formation then is ongoing. It is not just a part of BPS history, now regretted. The group recently appointed to update the document remains shadowy and has only included (unnamed) so called ‘memory experts’, from the closed system world of experimental psychology. All attempts by those BPS members interested in the clinical and epidemiological evidence (an open system feature of the world outside of the laboratory) to join the group have been blocked repeatedly. Moreover, all attempts to ascertain who exactly is on this group have been met with refusals on grounds of data privacy. It seems that the older biases to consider false positive decision making may well remain. The implausible claim that the BPS is guided by the organisational principle of transparency is also obvious here.

Meanwhile, the BPS, as with now withdrawn gender document, seems to have no capacity to reflect on the child protection implications entailed in a lop-sided and partisan, form of policy formation. The only sop that excluded critics have been offered is to submit papers to a minor journal, which is under the editorial control of FMS supporters. As with the case of the gender document, the temporary capture of a weakly governed Society, by a particular interest group, has to await external scrutiny to expose its bias and the dangers this poses to the public. Once again, internal dissent has been quashed at the expense of both membership democracy and academic integrity.

As the evidence now accumulates from historical inquiries into child sexual abuse, both in the UK and Australia, the BPS policy is a new potential target for angry survivors, seeking personal justice. Their lawyers will have spotted that line of attack. The current BPS position, to date, has colluded with the idea that child sexual abuse has been a trivial moral panic. The truth of the matter is that its scale has been strongly under-estimated, as is now becoming clear, in both the statutory inquiries and clinical research (Pilgrim, 2018; Children’s Commissioner’s Report, 2016).

Conclusion

The BPS leaders are in for another ‘challenging year’. Hiding in the dark, under the security blanket of group-think, will not make the lawyers disappear by magic. They will still be there, rubbing their hands, when the blanket it whisked away. Critics of all the three forms of BPS failing, noted above, may have been easy to ignore by the cabal. The rule of law is a different matter. If those in Leicester are not worried by now about imminent legal threats to the reputation of the Society, then they clearly do not understand what is going on.

References

Children’s Commissioner’s Report (2016) Barnahus: Improving The Response to Child Sex Abuse in EnglandLondon: UK Children’s Commissioner’s Office

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176,

Cutajar, M. C., Mullen, P. E., Ogloff, J. R. P., Thomas, S. D., Wells, D. L., and Spataro, J. (2010). Psychopathology in a large cohort of sexually abused children followed up to 43 years. Child Abuse and Neglect 34(11), 813–22.

Pilgrim, D. (2022) Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong? Bicester: Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2018) Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge.

Sutton, J. (2014). BPS – obsessed with the false memory syndrome? Editor’s reply. The Psychologist 27, 5, 303.

Valenstein, E. (1986) Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness New York: Basic Books.

Administrator’s note

All of these topics have been subject to comments on the blog. By clicking on the category immediately above the title you will find the relevant posts.

"The Psychologist", Academic freedom and censorship, Identity Politics

Class as a “Protected Characteristic”?

4th Aug 2022 AdminBPSWatch

The current issue (a ‘…bumper edition…’ according to the managing editor) of The Psychologist^[1] is promoting the idea of making social class a protected characteristic under the Equalities Act. This campaign (surely running close to the wind as regards charity law?) is being promoted on the BPS Twitter account as well. Whether you think that this is a good idea or not, it looks to our eyes that it is feeding directly into the hotbed that is identity politics. As a consequence, the slant and positioning of the BPS cannot be said to reflect any sort of balance scientifically (or politically, for that matter). It also ignores or is ignorant about the considerable social scientific literature, which has informed debate on this contested and contentious issue over many years (I had the good fortune to have a two-year sociology subsidiary as part of my first degree).

Our own experience, as well as that of others, is that the BPS chooses to avoid debating different positions to its own ‘party line’ and either ignores or censors^[2] contributions that challenge and offer reasoned critiques. For that reason we feel that the following piece from David Pilgrim deserves to see the light of day. We welcome your comments, especially from those within the BPS who are promulgating this campaign.

Peter Harvey,

Blog Administrator.

^[1] https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/people-us

^[2] https://bpswatch.com/2021/02/07/david-pilgrims-disappearing-article/

Open commentary on the special issue on ‘Tackling Class-Based Inequalities’ (The PsychologistJuly/August 2022)

David Pilgrim

Introduction

The discipline of psychology is in trouble and so is the British Psychological Society (BPS). Ignoring that current reality in the face of the policy initiative being promoted in the special issue, would be an act of complicity. My response is offered as an invitation to debate the dire state we are in as a discipline, within a neoliberal context in which the authoritarian norms of identity politics are now suffocating freedom of expression.

The topic of inequality has been of professional interest to me for over forty years, during which time I have also been an ambivalent member of the BPS. I have a Masters in sociology, as well as a PhD in social psychology and have many years of experience researching and publishing from the interface between these disciplines. This is reflected in my split career (half the time as a clinical psychologist in the NHS and the other working in health policy research as a jobbing social scientist). My academic focus has largely been in relation to mental health and inequality (e.g. Rogers and Pilgrim, 2020; Rogers and Pilgrim, 2003).

With my interests and mandate duly declared, below I address three main matters: the legitimation crisis of British psychology; the risk of uni-disciplinary knowledge claims and interest work; and the particular risk of psychological reductionism, given the capture of organisations by versions of identity politics. All of these form the embedding context of the campaign to add social class to the list of protected characteristics.

I finish with some ideas about the modest contribution that psychology might make to our understanding of social class, within the recent constraining norms of identity politics. I also caution against psychologists indulging in identity politics campaigns. In my view, they jeopardise both our individual intellectual curiosity and our collective disciplinary credibility. They close down curiosity and merely demand that we adhere to new moral strictures in an unquestioning manner.

1 The legitimation crisis of British psychology

A view from British psychologists about anything of public policy relevance is being expressed from a position of weak legitimacy for two additive reasons. First, the body claiming to uphold academic values (the BPS) has proved itself to be neither a learned nor a learning organisation. That legitimation crisis has been evidenced by the following:

1 In recent times the BPS has lost one after another elected President and some have tried and failed to correct the evident dysfunction they encountered after their election. In 2020 no less than three departed over a two month period, with two resigning and one being expelled before their period of office was up. The last of these is now taking his case to an Employment Tribunal, which will lead to the inner workings of the BPS being exposed to forensic public scrutiny for the first time. In advance of this case being heard, those of us who have been campaigning to open up the BPS to public scrutiny, will outline their conclusions presently (Pilgrim, 2022a). We have recorded the process of the campaign on a blog and on Twitter, and these can be accessed immediately (BPSWatch.com; FakeBPSCommentary @psychsocwatchuk).

2 In 2020 a major fraud came to light, implicating a former employee. In January 2022 she was sentenced to 28 months in prison for defrauding the Society of over £70,000. She had been imprisoned in the past for a similar offence in two other organization (a total of 17 offences). The BPS appointed her despite this past record noted very publicly in the press. Since the turn of this century, other ‘financial irregularities’ in the Society have been dealt with by internal investigations and staff departures. The BPS membership has been kept in the dark about these events, with no account being offered in The Psychologist of the unfolding drama of the past two years.

3 The Charity Commission has been ‘engaged’ with the Society about its broken complaints process and its lack of adequate governance. However, to date this engagement has not ensured any observable organizational reform of substance. The Commission has received many expressions of concern from BPS members, and this pattern continues as the crisis fails to resolve. A particular challenge we face at present is that the Charity Commission itself has been ineffectual.

4 Whilst fair charges of misgovernance and corruption can be made about the BPS, these accusations have not been addressed publicly, or fairly and squarely, by the leadership of the Society. Instead, legitimate criticisms and queries have been ignored and denied.

5 For a year (between November 2020 and November 2021) the Chief Executive Officer of the Society was suspended in the wake of the fraud investigation noted in 2 above. His Finance Director was also suspended at the same time (November, 2020) but within a month he left to take up a new position at the National Lottery, while still under investigation.

6 Despite all of the above shenanigans, the leadership of the Society has failed to keep its members informed of the crisis. The BPS is allegedly a membership organization, and good practice, according to the Charity Commission, requires transparency and accountability from the Board of Trustees and the Senior Management Team. They have clearly failed in that regard.

7 This organizational turbulence reflects longstanding structural and cultural difficulties in the Society in recent decades. At the heart of the problem is that the Board of Trustees is riven with conflicts of interest and it has no truly independent members (though some minor tinkering of about this basic fault has now emerged). Since the 1960s it has been a sham of a proper Board of Trustees, expected reasonably under charity law.

Not only but also…..

Even if the BPS were not a case study in organisational dysfunction (which currently it patently is) there is a second source of the legitimation crisis in British psychology, viz: the rise of methodologism in the midst of epistemological incoherence. For the first half of the 20^th century, psychologists followed the tradition of British empiricism announced by Ward and Rivers (1904). For the second half it then struggled to adapt to the modish postmodern turn (Kvale, 1992).

Squaring this circle has been a challenge for the discipline. During the twentieth century, it lurched between a positivist confidence in fact building (from a mixture of experimentalism and the actuarial approach) and a rejection of facts in preference for unending perspectives, narratives, discourses and discourses about discourses in the tradition of Nietzsche (Pilgrim, 2020). This left the discipline in a confused and confusing state, with the BPS tending to describe itself vaguely, but understandably, as a ‘broad church’. It is no longer clear what psychology as a science actually means (e.g. Smedslund, 2016; Snoeyenbos and Putney, 1980).

Today in the corridors of any psychology department that incoherence is apparent and the only remaining rhetoric of justification for a coherent disciplinary character is methodological rigour, with the compatibility of quantitative and qualitative methods being far from self-evident. Beyond ‘methodologism’ or the ‘methodological imperative’ (Gao, 2014) are a legion of psychological theories, some of which are aligned and some of which are totally incommensurable.

Given this legitimation crisis, why should British psychologists at present have any policy plausibility or inspire public confidence? How can we appeal for the need for participatory democracy, when our own professional and disciplinary body is the very opposite of democratic? Given that those in the BPS, reporting in this special issue class discrimination, are themselves now part of middle class life, what point is exactly being made, beyond virtue signalling and special pleading?

The meritocratic discourse of equal opportunity is unremarkable across our current political spectrum: who is formally against it in any major political party? Given that doxa in our political class, we tend to find a self-serving trope. We are offered stories of success or exclusion, which tend to centre on the moral virtue of being from a poorer background. However, it is a clouded window into understanding the complexity of social inequality.

Like many others in my age cohort I came from a working class background and am now middle class. However, my personal experience (or anyone else’s in the same boat) really contributes very little to an understanding of social inequality. To mention it at all brings with it legitimate suspicions of hypocrisy and narcissism. It can have marketing value for multi-millionaire rock stars, who dress the part for their audiences (Womack et al, 2012). Politicians of left and right appeal to our sympathies and votes, when alluding to their humble origins. That same pattern is repeating in professional (note) organisations like the BPS.

Asking individuals to illuminate societal functioning from their experience generates highly partial, and possibly misleading, forms of sociological understanding (Archer, 2000). Moreover, a transition from working class to middle class life entails accruing cultural power in a new position of influence, even if the cultural field is less powerful than that of the economic sphere (Bourdieu, 1984). To allude to one’s past working class credentials for current ‘street credibility’, as an oppressed person, is a form of having one’s cake and eating it.

2 The problem of uni-disciplinary knowledge claims and interest work

Even if British psychology were not characterised by the above legitimation crisis, it would still have a remaining challenge. Psychology, like other disciplines, will be prone to oversell its relevance and encourage psychological reductionism in its own ranks, as well as for the publics it appeals to and relies upon for employment and status. The very fact that a ‘special issue’ of The Psychologist about social class was published, indicates the weak a priori authority psychologists have about it, or any other topic which is partially or wholly social, not individual, in character.

These social phenomena can then become a bolt on consideration, with psychologists looking hither and thither for their special contribution. This is not to say that psychology has nothing to offer (below I indicate what that is) but the pastiche of knowledge in the discipline of old fashioned positivism (pace Ward and Rivers) and the postmodern preoccupation with perspectives and narratives has led to disciplinary incoherence. What exactly is, or would be, ‘the psychology’ of social class (or any other social topic)? To answer that question, the discipline must first start with a good dose of epistemic humility, about its inner philosophical turmoil, largely un-reflected upon, and its relative ignorance about contributions from other disciplines.

Moreover, in the latter regard, the forms of psychological insight that have been offered, and importantly have giving due weight to social context, may be little known in the ranks of trained psychologists. After all, ipso facto they are not economists, political scientists or sociologists. Their awareness of the existing and considerable literature in these other disciplines is likely to be absent or incidental. Accordingly, when outside inspiration is conceded by psychologists, then even the basic facts may be sketchy.

This problem of the sketchy knowledge of psychologists of social and political science, is amplified by the epistemic background of those outside who, have made major contributions already to our understanding of the psychosocial aspects of social class. This has put to shame what psychologists have developed in comparison to date (e.g.Sennett, 2003).

Moreover, the post-positivist and post-Marxian work of the later Frankfurt School speaks directly to those writing in this special issue (Habermas 1973; Honneth, 2007), while being steeped in sociological sophistication. Broadly those psychosocial insights have been offered by the incorporation of ideas from Weber, Marx and Bourdieu; three key contributors to our understanding of social class, who are not on the undergraduate curriculum in British psychology departments (to my knowledge). Some psychologists may have been blessed already with a ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959) but if that is the case, their teachers will not typically recognise and encourage its development.

This is the epistemological context of psychological reductionism and the risks of psychology overselling its relevance, about a topic which has been explored already and over many decades by non-psychologists (Atkinson, 2015). Psychologists are not only ‘late to the show’, there is a risk that the confidence of uni-disciplinary reasoning creates an inflated sense of their own relevance or importance.

All disciplines are prone to some extent to this mixture of arrogance and ignorance; this is not an accusation about psychology alone. It reflects the self-reinforcing role of the sub-division of intellectual labour in the modern academy, which is now an abiding obstacle to the interdisciplinary cooperation, required pragmatically in order to solve humanity’s considerable current challenges.

3 Psychological reductionism and social phenomena

A focus on protected characteristics brings with it an inherent risk of psychological reductionism. The emphasis will on individual rights and prospective victimhood. That focus became evident in Western cultures after the postmodern turn and was influential beyond psychology as a discipline. For example, the concept of intersectionality developed in the USA, within its own very particular cultural context of individualism, national exceptionalism and the demands of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Initially, intersectionality usefully illuminated complex social determinants of oppressions operating in synergy (Bell, 1973; Crenshaw, 1991). This was not reductionist about individuals but argued that overlapping social groupmembership placed some people at particular risk of oppression on average compared to those in other groups. Thus oppression was about supra-personal generative mechanisms in a shared social context and was thus a window into social determinants.

However, individualism then crept in increasingly, with a shift away from intersecting socio-economic forces towards a kaleidoscope of subjectivities. Oppression then became more and more about individual victimhood and less and less about structural disparities of power and wealth. That alteration of focus, from objective complexity to subjective reporting, was encouraged by liberal third wave feminism and Queer Theory. These displaced the material focus of both old school social science and second wave feminism (Butler, 1990; Rubin, 1992).

From then on, social justice became defined by what individuals claimed about themselves. This culminated in our current context of identity politics (Pilgrim, 2022b). These have divided people against one another within an unending personalistic focus on epistemological privilege, self-righteous indignation, ‘calling out’, ‘cancel culture’, special pleading for particular groups and a morass of daily moralisations or ‘moral grandstanding’ (Tosi and Warmke, 2020).

Accordingly, our lives are increasingly governed now by what Loic Wacquant calls the ‘logic of the trial’, where we are all judge and jury but might find ourselves in the dock as well. With social media, this can lead to us being turned upon by the cyber-mob for saying the wrong thing, or even simply saying nothing (e.g. ‘white silence is violence’). Our careers can be ended and anonymous online death threats have become so prevalent that they are now unremarkable (e.g. ‘kill a TERF’).

Equality and diversity training has become an industry on the back of this self-righteous civil chaos (Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2020; Williams, 2021) and people stopped talking calmly and analytically and began shouting at one another instead (Charles, 2020). Identity politics and their personalistic rationale have given comfort to the paedophile, the white supremacist and the feudal theocrat, not just those on the ‘woke’ left (François, and Godwin,2008; Belew, 2020; Hansen, 2021; O’Carroll, 1980; Sen 2006).

As Nancy Fraser noted in response to this unnerving scenario, there is little point in moralising angrily about what she called ‘parity of participation’ in relation to individuals, unless we also calmly consider and understand their conditions of possibility (i.e. their wider embedding social and economic divisions). This means shifting our focus from individuals to social, and even at times biological, material reality (Fraser, 1999; Flatschart, 2017; Benton, 1991). It also means returning to a supra-personal focus on capitalism, patriarchy and post-colonial legacies as social forces.

With the emergence and new doxa of identity politics, the duality of social class as both an objective aspect of social ontology and a reported subjective experience explored by Marx, Weber and subsequently in deeper ways by Bourdieu was lost (Marx, 1859/1968; Weber, 1905/2001; Bourdieu, 1987). Suddenly the lop-sided priority was on personal experience and group membership. For identity politics this became the alpha and omega of understanding power.

Psychological and cultural reductionism then awaits and this might cover up, not just expose, injustices, with policy makers exploiting the unending judgmental relativism of the postmodern era, with its appeal to linguistic variance. Remember that under Thatcherism we had ‘health variations’ not ‘health inequalities’? Note how Rishi Sunak is being described as coming from a ‘humble background’ in his candidacy to replace Boris Johnson. Words alone are cheap and slippery, when we address social justice today and the postmodern turn is quite rightly also called the ‘linguistic turn’. Accordingly, here is the prescient insight of the humourist Jules Feiffer:

I used to think that I was poor. Then they told me that I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged. Then they told me under-privileged was over-used, I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a cent but I have a great vocabulary. (Feiffer, cited in Pilger, 1989)

A narrow preoccupation with protected characteristics and the valorisation of subjective identities and discourse, have encouraged this problem of class being unanchored from its objective context. We can easily forget that although ideas might indeed be causally efficacious, power also resides in the non-discursive realm of material reality (Bhaskar, 1997). The latter refers to our relationship to both nature and social structures.

Policy capture, consumerism and neoliberalism

A loss, or lack, of sophistication about both biological and social ontology has at times left organisations captured by group special pleading. An example here is the controversial emergence of the gender document produced by the BPS, driven by transgender activism. This has fed into the febrile and contested field of policy development about transgender healthcare (Pilgrim, 2021).

In a similar manner, those aligned with the False Memory Society took charge of the BPS working group on memory and the law (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). This use of the BPS as a vehicle for policy lobbying is now obvious (including in this case, the use of a special edition of The Psychologist to promote a particular cause). This scenario reflects a combination of weak membership engagement and poor governance at the centre, covered in the first section above.

Those able and willing to put the hours in to pursue a particular policy goal can readily exploit that unhealthy structure. I have been party to such a capture myself in relation to documents on psychosis and psychiatric diagnosis. So my point here is about process not content. We all may have various preferences and value-judgements in relation to the latter but it is the process of weak democracy and poor governance in the BPS, which is at issue here.

Poor governance has also allowed those leading the organisation to make ex cathedra decisions and statements with no consultation. For example, the President of the BPS announced on social media (Ukraine flag always for now dutifully provided) that ‘we’ had decided to vote to expel Russians from the EPA. Maybe some Russian psychologists were under threat at home and maybe a dialogue with them might have been illuminating. But why bother with that sensitive approach to international dialogue, cooperation and support, which might require the effort of considered negotiations, when virtue signalling online is prioritised? Rapid fire clictivism now dominates civil life replacing proper deliberation about a complex world. As Charles (ibid) says of clictivism, in the vernacular, “it wants to be activism, but it can’t be arsed”.

In our neoliberal context, organisations (such as the BPS) are concerned to appeal to their ‘customers’ in a way that does not damage their income generation but rather improves it. More widely in the market place, the ‘pink pound’, the ‘grey pound’ and the ‘black dollar’ are precious commodities (Goulding, 1999; Matthews and Besemer, 2015; Yewande et al, 2020).

Cable sports channels can safely endorse Black Lives Matter (BLM) and ‘taking the knee’ to ‘root out racism on or off the field’ is a safe piety, which requires no critical analysis of the global soccer industry. The latter has been a place for kleptocrats to launder their money. It is a vehicle for upward social mobility for poor Africans and working class European youngsters. It has been a commercial opportunity to expand the gambling industry, which ruins countless lives.

None of that complexity, inviting socio-economic analysis, is touched by virtue signalling from the rich and powerful to keep their customers satisfied by the marketing endorsement of BLM. After all, who would be pro-racist or admit to it publicly? Neoliberalism and identity politics fit hand in glove. This context of neoliberalism is an important driver of personalistic reasoning, the displacement of participatory or deliberative democracy by identity politics and the shift to the protected characteristics approach to social justice (Arendt, 2005).

Apples and oranges

And if we do endorse such a protected characteristic listing of potential victimhood, then more analysis is required, if for no other reason, than it contains apples and oranges, when viewed ontologically not merely epistemologically. Under the current nine point listing two of them are fixed by biological ontology. Our sex is described (not ‘ascribed’) at birth or prenatally and is locked from cradle to grave by our chromosomes. The disadvantage then created by patriarchy, when brought up as a girl, becomes part of social ontology.

Similarly, when we are born defines immutably the limits of our existence in time. Our life span is limited and so age is a non-discursive matter: we grow older and eventually we die. That is a biological fact for all living organisms-we cannot talk our way out of this (Callinicos, 1993). On my deathbed, self-identifying as being alive with my last breath will not save me. As with our sex, we cannot defy the material constraints of the natural world by merely making subjective declarations, of the ‘I identify as X’ type. At this point social constructionism becomes a form of social psychosis (Craib, 1997). (The anti-realism of strong social constructionism in British psychology has been explored by Cromby and Nightingale (1999).)

However, elsewhere on the list, biology is still present but it is far less relevant. Other mammals may pair for sexual reproduction but they do not get married. They have no rich view of themselves as having a sexual orientation and your pet dog will have no religious identity or ever become a jihadist (Bentall, 2018). Our capacity for meta-cognitions and meta-statements bequeathed by evolution, given our enlarged cerebrum, affords our capacity to be both moral agents and rule following interdependent beings. Normativity is complex and shifts over time and place but it always exists as a driver of human societies. It is the source of political ideologies, which argue for the retention of current inequalities in a social order, or seek to transform them (Savage, 2000).

Thus, this nine point list contains items which are not ontologically equivalent. Social class if added, like race, is ambiguous because it is both a social ascription experienced personally as a matter of standing, status, honour or self-respect and it is derived from supra-personal socio-economic disparities (Wacquant, 2022 a&b). Psychology potentially has something to say about the former but it might be wise to leave expertise about the latter to social and political scientists and rapidly learn from them about what they already have had to say.

Does psychology have anything meaningful to say about protected characteristics?

Given my criticisms above, this question remains pertinent. The contributors to the special issue on the one hand confess the ‘scant evidence’ in psychology and yet there is a massive failure (wilful or from ignorance) to concede that other disciplines have already addressed the topic at length. The ambivalence about positivism and perspectivism also is evident. There is angst about being able to measure social class as a fixed variable (the old positivist’s dilemma) but also a discursive focus on the stories that people tell about their lives and their possible identity confusion over time (the postmodern norm).

These tensions are there too in social and political science more widely, but the difference is that they are directly acknowledged as both a theoretical question and one of methodological options. This has led then to a higher order discussion in sociology about reflexivity (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Donati and Archer, 2015). Such a higher order discussion is surely now required in psychology. At present that has started in a very personalistic place, tinged heavily with special pleading, i.e. psychologists reflecting on their own class position over time and talking about access to the discipline. However, this is a start of sorts.

For now, with their angst about measurement on the one hand and story-telling on the other, psychologists still have something to offer, as the contributors to the special issue make clear. I would add some other opportunities from within. Social psychology has provided some useful material on new social movements, group dynamics and prejudice (e.g. Leyens et al 2000; van Zomeren, 2014).

Evolutionary and cognitive psychology inform us about slow and fast thinking. The latter is part of the current problem of binary reasoning in the dead end of identity politics, with its moral grandstanding (Dutton, 2020). The sub-text of special pleading by the various fractions of identity politics is one of ‘inside good, outside bad’ binary logic: ‘My group and I are virtuous and vulnerable but those outside are bad and guilty, until proven innocent, of victimising me’.

Binary reasoning begets moral absolutism, which could be a topic of interest for psychologists, as moral philosophers have already noted (Neiman, 2011). The splintering divisions of identity politics ensure hostility not solidarity and these invite psychological description, interpretation and possible explanation, as social psychological phenomena. This might augment, empirically, the arguments made by those such as Neiman cited.

Psychologists might also put their own house in order (from the undergraduate curriculum upwards) about construct clarification and validity, especially in relation to biological and social attributions. For example, in relation to my point about apples and oranges on the nine point list, disability subsumes biological impairment (affecting the functional capability of all animals, not just humans) but also the normative evaluation of those impairments. The ‘social model’ of disability, with its emphasis on enablement and stigma, tends to focus on the social construction of disability but this is a matter of contention.

Its application to mental health is even more problematic and note that the elephant in the room about the list is that psychiatric patients have their citizenship habitually constrained lawfully and without trial under ‘mental health law’, so called (Pilgrim and Tomasini, 2012). How is the Equality Act relevant to, or compatible with this, routine authoritarian override from agents of the state? Transgender politics are fraught and unresolved, with advocates of sex-based rights complaining about those politics reflecting a patriarchal “men’s movement” (Brunskill-Evans, 2020). Black feminists did not take kindly to the excesses of secessionist black power in the USA, dominated by a form of religious patriarchy (Allen, 1996; Collins, 2006).

These are some examples, amongst many, of the divisiveness of identity politics and the zero-sum game of competing claims of personal oppression or victimhood. Psychologists may wish to research the character of those claims and the people who are making them. Despite the risk of psychological reductionism, my view is that complex research task warrants more, not less, psychological understanding. However, the latter requires the co-presence of a moderating and genuine sociological imagination. Without that, psychological reductionism will inevitably follow.

The wide differences of point of view in the current chaos of identity politics and our ‘culture wars’ warrant considered personal exploration. Also surveys by political psychologists might offer information on fluxing views of the popularity of sub-group opinions today. If psychologists are genuinely interested in the topic of living with inequalities then campaigning for one sub-group will overly narrow their intellectual responsibility.

Class more than the other nine pre-existing protected characteristics is tautologically about inequality (the clue is in the name), though some feminists make a similar argument and designate sex as a class. If the term inherently signals discrepancies of power, wealth, ownership and standing, then surely psychologists should also be interested in the rich and those in the middle, not just the poor and the powerless. For example, the very rich experience and express personal insecurity (Frank, 2008) and even our royals, with or without cynicism, episodically signal their psychological vulnerability. (In Britain in recent times we have witnessed one prince selling the Big Issue and another campaigning about mental health problems.)

The search for connectivity with others and the wish to be seen as ‘ordinary’ is common in the super-rich, which is psychologically intriguing and warrants more research. A good role model about being open-minded in our research curiosity was the early work of Marie Jahoda, who included Nazis in her social psychological studies of prejudice. Studying all-comers about living with inequalities is surely our academic duty, which might be clouded and diverted by single issue public policy lobbying.

Thus there is plenty for psychologists to work with, while retaining their tenuous disciplinary unity with its compromises about methodology. My view though is that before that exercise, psychologists should take a peek into what other disciplines have already achieved in relation to psycho-social insights, so that wheels are not re-invented. More importantly, in this case they may wish to reflect carefully on the risks of being swept along by the current norms of their own wider context, with its confusing wrong turn into the conservative cul-de-sac of identity politics.

Studying identity politics (or the psychological character of ‘protected characteristics’) on the one hand, and embracing a campaigning loyalty to them as citizens on the other, are different matters. If they become conflated then surely the latter will undermine the former. Empirical detachment is particularly challenging in human science, because we are part of our own embedding context. The task is not impossible but it is difficult. This is the very reason why we need to reflect upon the best way to maximise its limits, when producing knowledge claims and defending respectful free expression about their merits.

Today self-censorship in the academy has mirrored the wider acceptance of the suppression of freedom of expression, which might create a sense of temporary virtue but is not healthy for either knowledge production or democracy. Reflexivity includes humility, not certainty, and requires us to respect those we do not particularly like, as a focus of our academic curiosity. By contrast, identity politics demands that traditional cautions about ad hominem reasoning are dismissed and then actually inverted, with epistemological privilege, ‘perspectivism’ and the ‘logic of the trial’ now defining legitimacy. If we wish, as citizens, to indulge in identity politics campaigns that is a personal option. However, we do so at our peril, if we also want to retain credibility as human scientists.

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"The Psychologist", Board of Trustees, Governance

In the name of God, go!

21st Feb 2022 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

The BPS surely has reached a point where Cromwell’s advice applies. The leadership needs to go and a new regime installed. Many people in recent times have been perplexed and angry, in equal measure, when trying to hold power to account in the BPS. Harry Truman may have had a notice on his desk saying ‘The buck stops here’, but that stricture went long ago in modern leadership. We are now in neoliberal narcissistic times. What does ‘taking full responsibility’ actually mean any more in public life? Boris Johnson and Sarb Bajwa seem to me to be peas from the same pod.

Many in Bajwa’s position might have been sacked on the very day that the large fraud under their watch was first exposed, but he was not. The Board of ‘Trustees’ suspended him (along with the Finance Director who smartly jumped ship in a month to be the Finance Director of the National Lottery Community Fund). But those ‘Trustees’ were culpable in the mismanagement of the fraud and so the survival of Bajwa is only one matter to reflect upon. In the future they may well be subject to legacy liability.

The Board knew of the fraud in January 2020 but the two at the top were not suspended until November. What were the Board doing in all those months? What were the toing and froing Presidents (Murphy and McLaughlin) doing in relation to the material fact of the fraud in that interim period? Whatever it was, the membership was certainly not kept informed. The ever biddable Psychologist retained its complicit silence. A few close onlookers, realising what was happening, were torn between George Orwell and Lewis Carroll for apposite literary allusions.

Bajwa, with the full confidence of the Board, returned after paid leave for a year. He defaulted to his old confident ways, aided and abetted now by the ‘election’ of an illegitimate President, who replaced the stitched up and spat out Nigel MacLennan. The latter being of personal integrity, and seeking proper transparency for members, would not be tolerated for too long, which proved to be the case. The cabal conspired successfully to expel him and this was not the suspended CEO’s responsibility, even if much else was and still is.

More bullshit from the top in 2022

Bajwa’s joint statement with Katherine Carpenter looked to a shiny future, turning their faces in personal convenience away from a dismal past. Truth and reconciliation were clearly not going to be on the cards for them, as that would require a thorough and open historical appraisal of organisational failure. At this point, once more take your pick between the sense making of Orwell or Carroll.

The bullshit of their joint piece in (you guessed it) The Psychologist (January 2022: 4-5) is extraordinary even by recent standards in the BPS. They remind us of ‘the importance of placing listening and sharing at the heart of everything we do.’ Really? Keywords recur in management rhetoric today including: ‘challenges’; ‘beating heart’; ‘rainbow spectrum’; ‘broad church’; ‘united mission’; ‘culture of togetherness’ (the clichés just keep on coming and they are all there in this piece ). Somebody actually sits down and writes this drivel – is there a handbook for managers they crib from? But the best is kept till last, given recent events. This appears in print and for the historical record on page 5:

We can commit from the outset, however, always to do our best to communicate openly and transparently, and to be the sharer of good news and bad. This will take courage, but we both believe that by pledging our full accountability to our members, we can only strengthen the trust between us. This is our commitment-please join us!

During the past two years, the public and BPS members have been kept well and truly in the dark or offered YouTube propaganda about the outcome of a show trial. Are we really supposed to believe a single word of that paragraph? Having said this, the word ‘outset’ might signal that this is a new commitment (like a New Year’s resolution). But, if so, are they implying that they have indeed been doing the very opposite until January 1^st 2022?

Carpenter is a senior manager in the NHS. If a scandal, of the scale we are facing surrounding the fraud, were to have occurred in her NHS Trust, there would have been a critical incident report made and a look back exercise announced. The BPS though plays by its own rules and these are made up as it goes along by the cabal. They act, not in the interests of members with the long term reputation of the Society in mind, but in their own. This will become clear with a proper historical reckoning, but until then we are all lumbered with self-interested short-termism.

Never mind that a woman with 17 offences and two prison terms behind her was appointed or that her bosses signed off one after another fraudulent claims. The cabal will just carry on and pretend that nothing of importance has happened. No heads need to roll and no statement required. The vague cliché of ‘lessons learned’ will suffice along with a ‘poor me’ plea that this has been a ‘challenging year’. Well, indeed, it has been extremely challenging for members of the BPS and the general public to find out what has gone on and who has been personally responsible. So ‘challenging for whom and about what?’, we might all well ask.

Bajwa as a role model of accountability

Talking of past form, Bajwa has been a poor role model for claimed transparency. His modus operandi has been deceptively simple: when people contact him about a matter that is not to his taste, then he simply does not reply to them. We have, on record, several examples of how mails from both individuals and in multi-signed versions have been simply ignored by Bajwa. Before his suspension, David Marks wrote to him about opening up a proper scrutiny of the Eysenck scandal. (This was twenty five years after the BPS were first contacted about the matter by Anthony Pelosi.) Marks was blanked by Bajwa. Three (sic) years later, after the latter had returned to his role, he still did not reply or apologise. He left it to a subordinate, Rachel Scudamore (Orwellian title, ‘Head of Quality Assurance and Standards’) to offer a viewpoint on the matter, using the first person plural in her token apology. Why did Bajwa not personally apologise in the first person singular? The answer seems to be, ‘because he could’.

What is the point of being the CEO of any organisation if you are not the final resting place of accountability? In my view, Bajwa has brought more shame on an already shameful organisation. These dilettante managers with no respect for academic values are bringing British psychology into disrepute. In a separate blog piece, we will soon revisit how this standard setting of obfuscation and disrespect for members from the top then affects the staff culture in Leicester and will continue to do so unless there is regime change.

What is to be done?

We have been coy on this blog about making concrete suggestions about what should now happen, given that the cabal and its surrounding dysfunctional regime have survived. With an ex-employee in prison after her recent episode of serial offending, and an expelled malcontent President safely dispatched, the dysfunctional system can roll on uninterrupted. It might survive for a while, even though it is in a form of weak special measures from the Charity Commission. However, nothing lasts and the truth of the shameful recent history of the BPS will be told.

My personal view is this. Bajwa and the Board of Trustees should now resign and the Charity Commission should appoint an administrator to ensure a democratic charity in full legal and regulatory compliance. True, not faux, Trustees would then be present to work at turning around a discredited shambles of an organisation. New managers could then give due respect to the skills and talents of the membership and ensure true not rhetorical transparency.

To cite it in full, ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’ Cromwell’s advice remains sound but the shower running the BPS today will probably cling on to power until the Charity Commission or another legal lever will prise them from their bunker.

"The Psychologist", Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Ethics, Governance

Is an authentic history of the BPS possible?

6th Jan 20228th Jan 2022 AdminBPSWatch

This post has been modified to include an addendum (shown after the references) to include feedback received since the original posting = Blog Administrator (8 January 2022).

David Pilgrim posts….

During 2021 the large fraud in the BPS was dismissed as a minor footnote in the Society’s accounts. Three elected Presidents disappeared over a two month period. Two resigned and another was expelled after a kangaroo court and a rigged appeal. In the interim period between the latter two events, he was publicly disparaged in a YouTube video.

For most of the year the CEO was suspended in the wake of the fraud. A temporary President was drafted in, with the help of a contrived illegitimate election, to bolster the diminishing credibility of the Board of Trustees. The Psychologist played its faithful role, as ‘the magazine of the British Psychological Society’, in what it reported and, more importantly, what it did not.

In the midst of these political events, poorly explored in public, there was another that went under the radar. An over-worked and under-paid part time archivist, in the History of Psychology Centre (HoPC) resigned, leaving it with no academic director or archiving staff and an uncertain future. Although the HoPC is not the singular route to build up a history of British psychology, it is fairly important. Accordingly, its sustainability, as a vaunted part of the BPS, is crucial for scholarly activity both inside and outside the Society.

The SMT have done little or nothing to protect it in recent years. Their mind has probably been elsewhere, managing the crisis they both inherited and amplified. One tactical option they seem to have chosen is to suppress history and to be evasive about their own detailed accountability. If that interpretation is correct then their motivation to support a proper history, especially recent history, will be weak or absent.

Whatever else we might say about the BPS, it is not a learning organisation. That aspiration would entail organisational norms, which celebrated transparency and honest reflection about current problems and their antecedents. Many of the postings on this blog have explored failures of probity and the evasion of learning from them on the part of the SMT and Board of Trustees. Here I want to just focus on the possibility of a history of the BPS.

Celebratory and critical histories

Until the middle of the 20^th century, British psychology was expanding slowly and loosening itself from the constraints of both medicine and philosophy. Early historical accounts, such as that of my old teacher, Lesley Hearnshaw, paid little critical attention to the Society and focused mainly on epistemological tensions (Hearnshaw, 1964). His task was empirical: map out what could be discerned to date about theory and findings, within the strengths and weaknesses of the British empiricist tradition. A critical take on that history awaited (cf. Pilgrim and Patel, 2015).

At that juncture, some early signs of malaise had to be acknowledged during historical uncovering. Hearnshaw was a friend of Cyril Burt and began to write a celebratory history of his work after his death in 1971. As the proofs were being prepared, accusations were emerging of Burt falsifying data and people. Hearnshaw had, as an old fashioned honest scholar, to re-write his ending. Hagiography had to be replaced with Burt being damned with faint praise. He had been President of the BPS (1941-1943). He was the trusty servant of the eugenic tradition developed by Pearson and Spearman at University College London. He was the main man in the mid-20^th century.. He was a public intellectual promoting an elitist eugenic view of human nature and he was not challenged by his peers of the time (Chamarette, 2019). At that time he was Mr British Psychology.

Burt succeeded Spearman as Professor of Psychology at University College in 1932. He always maintained the Spearman-Pearson position on ‘innate general cognitive ability’, which could be ‘objectively determined and measured’ (Burt, 1909). After the Second World War, he shaped the structure of British schooling and his advice to policy makers was well received in his Eugenics Society lecture (Burt, 1946).

Hearnshaw sadly had to record Burt’s fall from grace for the first time, leaving others to squabble over the best post-mortem (Hearnshaw, 1979; cf. Mackintosh, 1995). These efforts reflected efforts to respect the Popperian hope that science is self-correcting, via falsification and open contestation about findings and interpretation. In recent years, psychology in Britain and elsewhere has faced two challenges in this regard. The first is the replication crisis and the second relates to cheating; at times in psychology and other disciplines these have overlapped.

The Burt scandal reflected badly not only on British eugenics and British psychology but also on the BPS itself, given his past Presidential role. The force of eugenic psychology meant that ideology preceded findings; Hearnshaw used the phrase accurately from logical philosophy of Burt ‘begging the question’ (Pilgrim, 2008). Findings were co-opted selectively and then massaged (or invented) to maintain a pre-existing ideological position. This drama has repeated recently in the critique of Burt’s student, Hans Eysenck.

At the time of writing I understand that this matter is being reviewed by a group in the Society. Eysenck’s implausible findings about cancer and personality were reviewed by King’s College (KCL). Eysenck successfully courted funding from the tobacco companies. In exchange he offered them the comforting theory that cancer-proneness and addictive tendencies were inherited. The narrative of these coming together to account for lung cancer incidence could then displace the idea that big business was encouraging addiction for profit and was the source of a major public health problem. Favourable research might augment cigarette marketing.

In 2019 the KCL review* of Eysenck’s work concluded that it was ‘unsafe’ and incompatible with expectations of good clinical research. Criticisms of this work had been known since the 1990s and eventually lobbying from those like Anthony Pelosi prompted the KCL review and the incipient look back from the BPS (Pelosi, 2019).

An organisation without a memory?

Will the BPS be forced to deal (eventually) with the Eysenck question, as they had in days gone by to deal with Burt and his dubious findings? The jury is out for now, but the following might be relevant to note. The editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, David Marks, wrote to Sarb Bajwa in November 2018 asking for the BPS to take its responsibilities seriously about Eysenck, and received no reply.

Three years of radio silence later and after a prompt, Marks still had no reply from the CEO but he did get a response from Rachel Scudamore (‘Head of Quality Assurance and Standards’) apologising for Bajwa’s inaction. She opted to use the first person plural to avoid a third person accusation of her manager.

Why Bajwa did not reply apologetically himself is not known. However, it was a time when those at the centre of the BPS would quite often fail to reply to concerns. (We have reported this norm of contempt from the centre in previous postings, often about very serious matters.) One manifestation of secrecy at the centre of the BPS has been a casual indifference to membership inquiries and concerns.

As is often the case with scenarios like this, when trying to communicate with the powers that be in the BPS, we enter an Alice in Wonderland World, while being asked to take those leading the Society seriously. Credulousness is demanded in the face of the incredible material facts. The BPS until proved otherwise, is a self-deceiving and secretive bureaucracy. For now, with its governance unreformed and a cabal culture normalised, it is an organisation without a memory (cf. Donaldson, 2002).

This much we can say

In light of the above we can see a pattern of a rhetoric of history being taken seriously, alongside evasiveness in practice about any meaningful historical reflection. The HoPC has great rhetorical value for the BPS: just go onto the website and see it there as a key advertising feature for an alleged learned body. For now, like with much that is claimed from the cabal, this is bullshit.

The casual use of censorship by the cabal and the biddable role of The Psychologist reflect a disdain for academic freedom. Even if the HoPC were to be rescued from its near oblivion, what chance it developing and defending a critical, rather than a sycophantic and celebratory, history of the BPS? Will the SMT bother to finance such an academically independent Centre? Alternatively, will they continue to let it wither on the vine, while retaining its vacuous image cynically on the website? The BPS has huge reserves, some of which are being squandered on a poorly justified ‘Change Programme’ to the tune of (at least) £6 million. ‘Spare some change for the HoPC, governor?’ ‘Sorry mate, busy spending it elsewhere.’

As for the Eysenck review, we are all curious to watch its development. Though never given a Fellowship of the BPS, his leading role in British psychology has to be acknowledged by friend and foe alike. After his death in 1997 an annual memorial lecture was set up in his honour in the Society. It sits proudly in celebration of the British eugenic tradition, alongside the Spearman Medal.

Some have already queried the point of mulling over Eysenck’s flawed work (maybe like digging up Cromwell’s body and chopping off his head during The Restoration in 1661) (Hall and Scarnà, 2019). However, if the BPS cannot pronounce on the integrity of Eysenck’s work then who else can? Maybe the review of these alleged sins of the past is a convenient diversion from those of the present. Either way, his own words might be an ethical guide:

I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he (sic) sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts. (Eysenck, 1990: 229)

The KCL reviewers were unimpressed by the facts he favoured. At the time of writing, fourteen retractions from journals have been recorded of Eysenck’s work. His critics trace problems going back to just after the Second World War. Their vulnerability lies in Eysenck’s eugenic thought, repeating the problem of his mentor. A contradiction of his approach was that he was both a methodological behaviourist and a biogenetic ideologue. His cancer work reflected that: heredity accounted for causes but the treatment of patients warranted CBT (behaviour therapy was its ‘first wave’.)

How the BPS review of Eysenck’s work exactly came into being, and who was chosen to be part of it, remains a mystery. As with much that goes on in the BPS we will never know. Groups emerge by grace and favour and a tap on the shoulder to candidates who will not rock the boat. Given the preference of the CEO and the illegitimate President to look forwards, Pollyanna fashion, and never backwards, the prospect of an honest history of the BPS in the recent past looks slim indeed (https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-35/january-2022/president-and-chief-executive).

Conclusion

The Burt and Eysenck examples show that historical clarifications, guided by Popperian criteria of scientific correction and probity, are not easy, but they are at least possible in an open democratic society. Sadly it looks as though currently the BPS does not have the intellectual culture to deliver the same expectation. Toxic managerialism and a lack of independent trustees (a structural fault traceable to 1965 and not rectified when the opportunity arose in 1988) have suppressed, rather than celebrated, the obligation to learn from experience in the public interest.

Anti-intellectualism, censorship, secrecy, PR, spin, impression management and rigged expulsions and elections, for now dominate the decision-making priorities of the leadership. As a consequence, bullshit constantly displaces implausible claims of transparency. Maybe we will have to look outside for an authentic historical reckoning. It may have to come from the courts and investigative journalists.

References

Burt, C.L. (1946) Intelligence and fertility. Eugenics Society Occasional Papers Number 2.

Burt, C.L. (1909) Experimental tests of general intelligence. British Journal of Psychology III 94-107.

Chamarette, M. (2019) Psychologists as public intellectuals: Cyril Burt at the BBC in the 1930s. Stories of Psychology Meeting organised by the History of Psychology Centre, November 7th.

Donaldson, L. (2002) An organisation with a memory. Clinical Medicine 2, 5, 524-7.

Eysenck, H.J. (1990) Rebel With A Cause London: Transaction

Hall, J. and Scarnà, A. (2019) An aggravating controversialist or ahead of his time? The Psychologist November, 32, 5.

Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979) Cyril Burt: Psychologist Icatha NY: Cornell University Press.

Hearnshaw, L.S. (1964) A Short History of British Psychology London: Methuen.

Pelosi, A.J. (2019). Personality and fatal diseases: revisiting a scientific scandal. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(4), 421-439

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-284.

Pilgrim, D. and Patel, N. (2015) The emergence of clinical psychology in the British post-war context. In J. Hall, D. Pilgrim and G. Turpin (eds) Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives HoPC Monograph No 2. Leicester: BPS.

Mackintosh, N.J. (ed) (1995) Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

* The Institute of Psychiatry, where Eysenck worked, was subsumed into KCL in 1997, hence that College of the University of London now being the academic ‘owner’ of his legacy.

Addendum

This post has prompted email feedback from colleagues. I am grateful to them for the following minor corrections and their invited clarifications.

1. The archivist who resigned in 2021 was now, I understand, full-time not part-time. She left behind an assistant to work on her own in Leicester. To date the review group, set up three years ago to reinvigorate the HoPC still has had no formal commitment from the CEO or SMT to support an academic director, who would be guaranteed full autonomy in their role. To my knowledge no meeting has taken place in the interim between the Chair of the review group and the CEO. I understand from anonymous sources that a consultant may be imported temporarily to advise on archiving. However, I have been unable to confirm this possibility and its source, if any, in SMT decision making. (A theme on this blog is the arcane nature of decision making at the centre of the BPS.) We would of course welcome a full and clear update from the CEO or the ‘Director of Knowledge and Insight’ about their intentions about the ailing HoPC. I would put a very low probability of this happening, as the SMT have opted for a wilful and consistent policy of non-engagement with us. I have also sent a letter about my concerns about the HoPC to the ‘Director of Knowledge and Insight’ (copying to the CEO). Based on past trends, there is little likelihood that I will receive a reply. Currently I am Honorary General Secretary of the History and Philosophy Section but I sent my letter in a personal capacity. The Section will of course be taking all of the above matters seriously in relation to the vulnerability of the HoPC now and its future prospects.

2. The Spearman Medal has now been abandoned by the BPS in the face of criticisms about its eugenic roots. It was awarded finally in 2020 but, note, was only set up in 1962. The latter date reflects a mainstream commitment to the eugenic tradition in British psychology well after the Second World War. The British Eugenics Society changed its name to the Galton Institute in 1989. This euphemistic naming and the current rationale for the Institute can be found on its website. In 2020 University College London, removed the names of Galton and Pearson from its rooms and buildings.

"The Psychologist", Board of Trustees, Governance

More bullshit about a shiny new future

17th Dec 2021 AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

Readers of The Psychologist (first edition of the New Year) may or may not be inspired by the joint piece from Katherine Carpenter (BPS President) and Sarb Bajwa (BPS CEO), who are offering to lead us into a shiny new future. Your credulity is likely to rely on your answers to two starting questions. First, do you believe that the future of any system can be invented without reference to the reality of its past? Second, do you have grounds for trusting those currently leading the Society? My view is that both invite a negative response and here is why.

The future detached from the past

In open systems (and all human systems are open systems) future predictions are difficult. Nothing can be ruled out or ruled in for certain, apart from our individual deaths. However, systems theorists making this point (e.g. Bateson, 1972; Wilden, 1972) also recognise that there are ‘patterns that connect through time’. We can only make sense of the present by a careful description and appraisal of the past. If we do not, then we do so at our peril. The well-known cliché and truism is the adage from George Santayana, that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” An equally relevant insight came from George Orwell in 1984: “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” In this case, those controlling the present are silencing the past and imagining a future that ipso facto cannot be gainsaid.

The piece from Carpenter and Bajwa was accompanied by a reassuring photograph of them side by side. This must be a very recent snap, because the CEO has just returned to his office after a year’s suspension, in the wake of the large fraud being investigated internally, and externally by the Leicestershire police. For those still in the dark, the initial magistrate’s hearing of the ex-employee is in January. The progress of the case will be tracked by journalists but an account in The Psychologist is probably unlikely.

Carpenter, was installed to replace the stitched up and spat out President Elect, Nigel MacLennan, during Bajwa’s paid absence. So this new alliance at the top of the organisation has leapt into action quickly to make the best of a bad job. Remember that Carpenter’s election debarred the membership voting for any of their peers as is the norm; only those on the Board of Trustees (BoT) or Senate could be candidates. The BoT just made this rule up to suit themselves at the time. In my view, and that of many now, Carpenter is an illegitimate President.

Maybe this sounds harsh or unfair, until we place the joint statement in a wider historical context; the very exercise being avoided by the two sources of central power in the Society, for now. It is silent about the details of both the current political mess and its relevant antecedents. The usual vague statements about shared difficulties in recent times are there. It is true that we have all been in the same Covid-19 boat, even if some of us have had a better cabin or window seat. But what about the political meltdown of 2020? Did we all just imagine it? Carpenter and Bajwa are coy about this, so this is what happened, for the understandably uninformed.

Bajwa was suspended and then returned after 12 months (sic). The BoT fully supported his return in November. However, note carefully, the Board are not independent Trustees. Since 1965 the latter status has been totally absent in the BPS. That is (one reason) why the Charity Commission remain ‘engaged’ with the BPS , though the former are being slow in their efforts and the latter seem to be oblivious to the moral and legal implications of their non-compliance to date. The BoT are, though, accountable for their responsibilities in relation to financial probity, so the fraud must have been an unnerving scenario for them. Even resigning is not an answer because Trustees still have a ‘legacy liability’. Leaving the sinking ship is not a personal solution for Trustees, even if it may have a protective value for employees who have moved on.

With regard to the elephant in the room of independence, those involved in a charitable organization (as employees or volunteers) should be accountable to Trustees. Instead, in the BPS the ‘Trustees’ are appointed from within the organization or (in the case of the Presidential triumvirate elected but from the membership not the external public). Thus they may be Trustees, as self-defined since 1965 in the Royal Charter of the Society, but they are not properly independent and so they cannot offer impartial oversight, in accordance with expectations of good governance in a charity today.

Even for well-intentioned people, of good faith, in the BPS these faux-trustees will inevitably have conflicts of interest. The latter are endemic to the culture of the BPS. An independent Trustee, in any charity, is one who is able to walk away from the role with no personal implications for their income, career or vested interests. This basic expectation is missing in the BPS and it has had, and continues to have, dysfunctional consequences.

Untrustworthy leaders

Thus a structural flaw inherited from 1965 has now afforded a dysfunctional leadership culture. This well predated the additional dynamics triggered by the installation of a highly paid Senior Management Team after 2018. It is tempting to reduce the recent crisis to its appearance. Yes some of them are carpetbaggers with little or no historical understanding of British psychology or academic values. They may well flit in and out of the Society. Yes, they indulged in arm wrestling with the BoT about who was running the BPS, that is until the meltdown created by the fraud. Then they had to spin their way out of the problem together. Yes, they colluded with the BoT in a kangaroo court to ruin the career of an honest man trying to deal with the misgovernance he had correctly identified. The scapegoating of the whistle blower Nigel MacLennan, on trumped up charges, served to create an ephemeral moment of seeming unity at the top.

All of this is true. If it is not true then a full and frank account from the SMT or BoT for the membership would be most welcomed and we will post it on this blog. However, the systemic problem in the BPS (Bateson’s ‘pattern that connects through time’) predates 2018. If a determined historian, forensic accountant or investigative journalist were to try to describe events in their entirety in the Society in the past 30 years, they would be considerably challenged for two reasons.

First, a letter of permission would be required to access all the minutes of all the Boards (but especially the BoT). Second, and of more relevance, if that permission were granted they would find minutes that were skeletal, with important information absent or massaged to create the correct impression. This is not just about post hoc redactions. It is also what was chosen by those at meetings to record. Most readers will have witnessed the ‘this is not for minuting’ moment in many meetings in their careers. However, that tendency will have been in overdrive in the past decades of the BPS for its leaders to maintain, albeit implausibly, a ‘problem what problem?’ stance for so long.

Whether we examine the official accounts of the old oligarchy running the BPS (e.g. The Psychologist, 2017; The Psychologist, 2006) or the SMT driven-impression management more recently (to ‘control the narrative’) there has been no bad news forthcoming. When it has been hinted at, it has either been diversionary (e.g. forget the mess we created and look at our shared victimhood about Covid-19) or so vague that it is meaningless.

For example, when in that ill-advised performance Carol McGuinness read out the disparagement of Nigel MacLennan in advance of his appeal, there were vague allusions to a challenging year and being at a cross-roads. This YouTube clip available to the general public, link conveniently provided by the ever-biddable editor of The Psychologist, was an extraordinary exercise in bullshit.

Did McGuinness tell us why the year had been challenging? No. Did she tell us what the directions on the signpost said? No. Did she tell us the relevant substance about why MacLennan has been expelled? No. Did she mention that the BPS was facing a scandal about a large fraud? No. Did she explain just how the BoT was going to respond properly and in good faith to the requests for governance change from the Charity Commission? No. Did she explain why it was worth spending £6 million on an ill-formulated ‘Change Programme’, installed without full consultation by the SMT? No. Did she mention the NCVO observation about a toxic culture in the BPS? No. Did she mention the resignation of David Murphy and his concerns about governance and finance? No. The BPS lost three elected Presidents in a period of two months in 2021, making Oscar Wilde’s comments on losing two parents a lesser joke in comparison. The list of silences goes on and on.

This context of obfuscation provides ordinary members with few grounds for vertical trust in the BPS. It is important to contrast that problem with horizontal trust. Those in say local branches or Sections tend to develop good collegial relationships with their volunteer peers and they have to suffer little or no bullshit from one another. That horizontal trust might even at times tempt some sub-systems to break away from the main body (see my conclusions below).

Bullshit then is everything that is said and not said for the powerful to remain in power. What chance then our imaginary researcher being able to grasp the recent historical picture of how the BPS has functioned at the centre in the past few decades? This question has both an empirical aspect, with its implied methodological challenge, and an ethical one about the emergence of a longstanding culture of amorality at the centre of the BPS.

The History of Psychology Centre

If you go on to the BPS website one of the little boxes you can open is about the History of Psychology Centre. This is a personal interest (I am a past Chair of the History & Philosophy Section and its current Honorary Secretary). In that Section we are keen to encourage a serious (i.e. bullshit- free) interest in the history of British psychology and the BPS. That part of the website has many gaps and there is clearly still much un-archived material. This is not the fault of the few people doing the archiving to date, who have been over-worked and underpaid.

If we dig deeper we find a concern about political and budgetary priorities in the BPS. The Centre has struggled on for years now with a part-time archivist, technically challenged by a transitional period between hard copy and digital material to deal with. The BoT (via the Research Board) has done absolutely nothing to reinvigorate the Centre and the SMT have ignored it as a political priority. It needs more than one full time archivist and an academic director, whose role independence is guaranteed in advance. (Given the compromised role of the editor of The Psychologist, this should stand as a warning about the need for an arms-length approach to a scholarly history of the Society.)

This point about reinvigorating the Centre and its guaranteed academic protection has been made several times from those of us in the History & Philosophy Section to no avail. The Centre remains in a parlous state (the part-time archivist has recently left and not been replaced). Compare the lack of funding of the Centre with other BoT preferences, such as the controversial £6 million change programme, paid lawyers to advise on the expulsion of critics or the campaign to regain registration powers by encouraging new members in the mental health workforce, who are not psychology graduates. The costs noted here are direct (large amounts of the members’ subscriptions or the Society’s reserves) and indirect (the transactional time involved for all concerned). The History of Psychology Centre has been ignored as an organizational priority in this context of tellingly preferred projects.

A final ideological reflection

Here is a final summary thought then on the ideological point I am making here. This is gleaned from what is called, in the technical jargon of philosophy, an ‘omissive critique’ (Pilgrim, 2020). Why do we ask some questions but not others? Why do we invest time, effort and money on some goals and policies but not others? Why do we support and enlarge this part of the organizational structure but not that part? Turning that skeptical reflection on what has been happening in the BPS, and which priorities its leaders have emphasized at the expense of others, the shiny vision from Katherine Carpenter and Sarb Bajwa bears legitimate scrutiny.

They are part of a cabal that for now is letting the History of Psychology Centre wither on the vine, while retaining it on the website for its semiotic value of creating the impression of a learned society. They have other pressing priorities, willfully ignoring the advice of Santayana and evading the foreboding view of Orwell. They want us to look forwards not back, because that is politically expedient to preserve the status quo for those enjoying power in a purported learned Society with diminishing credibility. Moreover, the BPS seems to be incapable for now of being a learningorganization.

A learning organization requires honesty not bullshit, and candour about past failures (Sheaff and Pilgrim, 2006). It has to be ‘an organization with a memory’, not one of conveniently contrived amnesia and the crude escapism about imagined futures. Without this honest reckoning about the past, the BPS will be in terminal decline as a credible body, claiming to represent British psychology in its disciplinary and professional forms.

In 2000 many in the Division of Occupational Psychology left the Society to form the Association of Business Psychologists (renamed ‘Psychology’ in 2003). In 2017 disaffected members in the Division of Clinical Psychology left to form the Association of Clinical Psychologists. Both groups were tired of dealing with an arcane bureaucracy, with its self-interested leadership, which had lost its way and was insensitive to the needs of its members. That fractious fracturing may be the harbinger of a dark future for the Society, no matter what the illegitimate President and the returning CEO are saying in their Pollyanna piece in the New Year of 2022.

Bateson, G. (1972) Steps To An Ecology of Mind San Francisco: Chandler.

Pilgrim, D. (2020) Critical Realism for Psychologists London: Routledge.

Sheaff, R. and Pilgrim, D. (2006) Can learning organisations survive in the newer NHS? Implementation Science 1, 27.

The Psychologist (2022) Joint statement to the BPS membership from the President-Elect Katherine Carpenter and the CEO, Sarb Bajwa. January 4-5.

The Psychologist (2017) Always cheerful and positive. Carole Allan’s appreciation for the British Psychological Society’s retiring Chief Executive. November, 30, 2.

The Psychologist (2006) Double top – Ray Miller in discussion with Tim Cornford: The Society’s new President in discussion with the Chief Executive. How do their roles work together, and where do they see the Society going? April, 19, 20-21.

Wilden, A. (1972) System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange London: Tavistock.

Category: “The Psychologist”

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